How this works

Dealt — the hand

For every country in your birth year we build a hand-quality index from four things: income per person, how long people were expected to live, the share of children who survived to five, and years of schooling. Each is scored against every other country that year, then averaged. Your Dealt score is the share of babies born that year — everywhere, weighted by how many were actually born in each place — who drew a worse hand than yours.

Played — how you did with it

We take your household income, compare it fairly using purchasing-power parity, split it across the people it supports, and find where it sits in the income distribution of the country you were born in. Against your birth country, not the one you live in now — because moving is itself a play. A nurse who left a poor country for a rich one has played a strong hand, and this is the number that shows it. If you add net worth, we do the same against wealth.

What the income and wealth ladders are

Income is measured against survey data — what households told the World Bank they actually take home or spend, per person, in the country you were born in. That's the same kind of figure you enter, so the comparison is like-for-like. (An earlier version used pre-tax national income, which counts things like retained company profits and runs about double a survey pay-cheque; that mismatch is fixed.) Wealth uses a different source that reaches higher up the ladder, so both the income and wealth ladders now go past the 99th rung — a top 0.1% earner and a top 0.01% earner no longer look the same.

What this version gets wrong, on purpose

• The income and wealth distributions are for all adults, not people your age. A 25-year-old is measured against everyone, so early-career wealth reads low. A later version will match by age.
• Income is per person; we split your household with a standard equivalence scale rather than a straight head-count, so a couple isn't treated as two strangers. For very poor countries the income ladder is a survey of consumption, not pay — the closest like-for-like the data allows.
• Above the 99th rung the income ladder is extended by fitting the curve's own trend, since surveys thin out at the very top; the wealth ladder has real data that far up. Both are point-in-time, methodology v0.1.
• Schooling is missing for about half of countries in the historical record, so where it's absent we estimate it from the other three signals rather than drop it — dropping it quietly flattered the poorest places.
• The four parts of the hand are weighted equally. That's generous to countries that bought long, healthy lives on a small income — Vietnam in the 1970s scores higher than income alone would suggest. We kept it simple and honest rather than tuned.
• “Never finished secondary” is estimated from average years of schooling until a fuller completion series is wired in.