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 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.
• 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.