Early this year, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) stripped track and field star Usain Bolt of his gold medal in the 4 × 100-meter relay at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, thereby destroying one of his three legendary “triples,” doping was back in the headlines.

It sounds like detective work on a grand scale: How does one find several thousand works of art that vanished 73 years ago? How does a person go about searching for the collection that the Nazis stole from the heirs of one of the most influential men in Imperial Germany and the early Weimar Republic, publisher and patron of the arts Rudolf Mosse? Some pieces were sold off in forced auctions, some were bought in private sales, and the rest were scattered to the four winds. How do you find the proverbial needle in a haystack, not just once, but thousands of times over?

When politicians want to initiate important political, social, and economic processes of change, they are increasingly turning to statistically measurable values. Philipp Lepenies, a professor of political science at the Otto Suhr Institute, says the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in the fall of 2015, which call for a reduction of extreme poverty by 2030, may offer the most prominent example of this. According to Lepenies, these goals are intended to bring about no less sweeping a change than a worldwide shift toward sustainable development.