In 1947 the behaviorist B.F. Skinner conducted a simple experiment: hungry pigeons were fed at periodic intervals, yet what he observed was striking— whatever behavior preceded the first feeding was mistaken as cause and thus repeated. And because every new feeding seemed to prove their actions' effectiveness, they were stuck in an infinite loop.

We humans are not much better at distinguishing correlation from causality. And evolutionarily it makes sense for any organism's pattern recognition system to minimize true negatives and thus accept some false positives—not to have picked up a correlate to food leads to a Darwinian dead end faster than following a wrong lead, especially when there is a third variable that rewards the route nonetheless. But our hunger for meaning and coherence often outpaces what evidence can actually tell, and so we extrapolate from thin evidence, bridge knowledge gaps with speculative borrowings, and construct narratives that satisfy our urge to feel understanding and superior.

Especially my own academic background—political science—is stuffed with big yet meaningless umbrella terms. I want to irritate these grand theories with the inconsistencies and contradictions of numerical evidence. A good first exercise in humbling one's perception of the world could be to look at different country indicators.