Every life starts somewhere.
Your plane is waiting. The walk takes about fifteen minutes.
Departing from
Shrink the world to a hundred people standing in front of you. Each of them stands for 82 million. Before we tell you anything, pick them out yourself.
lived on less than $3 a day, 1990 to 2025
of every 100 children died before five, 1990 to 2024
adults in 100 could not read, 1976 to 2024
had no electricity at home, 1990 to 2023
The hundred is not standing still. World Bank, June 2025 ($3 a day line). UN IGME, 2025. UNESCO, 2024. World Bank and Tracking SDG 7, 2025 (electricity, 71% in 1990 to 92% in 2023).
Picture all eight billion of us in one line, shrunk to a hundred people, from the poorest at the back to the richest at the front. Before you tell us anything about yourself, walk to where you think you stand.
49 people behind you, 50 ahead.
Drag along the line, tap a spot, or use the arrow keys.
Now let's check. Nothing you pick here leaves this browser.
If your parents support you, count their whole household and their income.
people have been born since the first humans. You got exactly one of those lives, and you had no say in which.
Population Reference Bureau, 2022. Nearly 7% of everyone ever born is alive today.
Press the button and you are born again, to different parents, in a different place, in a different body, weighted by where people are actually born. Then watch that life run next to your own, year by year. Keep it, or hand it back. Spin the globe and tap a country to choose where.
One life is an anecdote. A hundred shows the odds you were actually drawn from.
How a drawn life is built: the country is drawn by where babies are actually born (UN World Population Prospects). Each line then starts from that country's national figure (World Bank, UNICEF, WHO, ITU), shifted for town or countryside and for the household's income. Treat each line as a likelihood, not a record.
If everyone put their problem into a hat, would you hold on to yours?
Most people keep their own. Not because it is lighter, but because they know its shape. The thing you would not trade away was handed to you.
And that settlement is not permanent. Every number on this walk has moved within living memory, most of them in the right direction, because people decided they should. The people doing it are named at every stop.
"The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world."Paul Farmer, as quoted by Tracy Kidder in Mountains Beyond Mountains, 2003
Most problems on this walk land harder on women and girls. Here is the same world, seen through the half of it that was born a girl.
women, nearly one in three, have lived through violence from a partner or sexual violence.
girls are married before they turn eighteen, every year.
women died in pregnancy or childbirth in 2023, about one every two minutes.
Today so far: 0 · the next in 2:01
until the gender gap closes at today's pace.
A girl born this year would be 120 when it does.
The gap does not start at work. It starts in what girls believe they can become.
At 5, girls and boys equally linked "really, really smart" to their own gender. By 6, girls did less, and avoided games for smart children.
Among top scorers in maths or science, 26% of boys but only 14% of girls expect to work in science or engineering at 30.
Women earn only 35% of science, technology, engineering and maths degrees worldwide, even though more women than men go on to higher education.
Only about 1 in 3 researchers worldwide is a woman, and women make up just 19% of AI engineers.
Women run just 34 of the world's 500 largest companies (6.8%), and only 28 countries have a woman as leader.
It can change. One hour with a visiting female scientist raised the share of final-year French schoolgirls choosing selective science programmes from 11% to 14.5%. And at 15, girls already outscore boys in science in 35 countries, while boys lead in only 6.
Sources: Bian, Leslie and Cimpian, Science 355, January 2017 (age 5 vs 6 brilliance and game findings); OECD Education Today, 'Gender gaps in education and work persist', March 2020, PISA 2018 data (26% vs 14% top performers; girls ahead in science in 35 countries, boys in 6); UNESCO, Status and Trends of Women in Science 2025, June 2025 (35% of STEM graduates, 1 in 3 researchers, 46% of women vs 40% of men entering higher education); WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2026, September 2026 (19.3% of AI engineers); Fortune Global 500, August 2026 (34 women CEOs, 6.8%); UN Women Facts and Figures, data as of 1 September 2026 (28 countries with a woman head of state or government); Breda, Grenet, Monnet and Van Effenterre, IZA Discussion Paper 13163, April 2020, published in The Economic Journal 2023 (11% to 14.5%).
Deaths in pregnancy and childbirth fell by 40% between 2000 and 2023. There are 50 million more girls in school than in 2015. Between 2008 and 2018 the share of young women married as children fell from about one in four to one in five, which meant 25 million child marriages that never happened.
Sources: ILO, 2025 (paid work). Inter-Parliamentary Union, August 2026. World Bank Women, Business and the Law 2024. UN Women (unpaid care). WHO, November 2025 (violence) and April 2025 (maternal deaths). UNICEF, 2023 and 2018 (child marriage). World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2026. UNESCO, 2023 (girls in school).
Each pale bar is what the world spends on one thing every year. The coloured bar inside it, drawn to the same scale, is what goes to something that keeps people alive, or what it would cost.
It does not take a fortune to move a number. This is what a few dollars do, by GiveWell's estimates for the charities it rates highest.
a year of vitamin A supplements for one child, cutting the risk of dying from common childhood illnesses.
one insecticide-treated bed net, delivered to a household where malaria is endemic.
preventive malaria medicine for one child through a whole malaria season.
saves a life, on GiveWell's estimate of its top charities. About what a used car costs.
GiveWell, top charities and cost-per-life pages, September 2025. Costs vary by country, and these are averages.
Consumer markets are industry estimates for 2024 or 2025 and vary by source; each is named below. The water and sanitation figure is what it would cost each year, not what is spent. The ratios are the point, not the decimals.
Most of these numbers were far worse within living memory. They got better because people decided they should.
people would have left extreme poverty since you reached this line, at the average pace of the last 35 years: about 115,000 every day.
Real progress from the last year and a half. Updated regularly, each with its source.
Last updated October 2026
Between 2000 and 2015, child deaths fell by 3.9% a year. Since 2015, by 1.5%. The World Bank says poverty reduction has also slowed substantially over the last decade.
Progress is not a law of nature. It is what happens when enough people decide a number is unacceptable.
You flew past a lot of problems. Nobody can carry all of them, and nobody has to. Go back to the one that stayed with you, see who is already working on it, and take an idea with you if one fits.
The best move is different for each of you.
Choose a route, then a place.
Each number counts up at the rate the latest global figures imply, second by second. They are estimates spread evenly over a year, not a live feed. Big numbers on their own are hard to feel, so each one also says what it means per minute, and the deaths are shown next to what is getting better at the same time.
All figures are rounded, and each one names where it comes from.
The countries. 201 countries and territories with at least 50,000 people. Population, births and life expectancy from the UN World Population Prospects 2024 via the World Bank; child mortality from UN IGME 2024; income as GNI per person at purchasing power parity from the World Bank; secondary completion from UNESCO; electricity from Tracking SDG 7; internet from the ITU; urban share from UN DESA; safely managed water from WHO and UNICEF; clean cooking from the WHO; undernourishment from the FAO; visa-free destinations from the Passport Index dataset. Where a country has no published figure, an estimate by income group is used and marked with a ~. The whole table can be downloaded below.
A hundred of us. Each answer is a published global figure, named under it. The hundred people on the screen are not drawn from the model; the model is only used when you tap a lit person to meet one of them.
The line, and Your place. Inside each country, incomes are spread on a log-normal curve around that country's GNI per person, with the same spread everywhere (sigma 0.85). The curves of all 201 countries are added up, weighted by population, to make one world line of a hundred. The whole line is then shifted so that 10 of the 100 fall below the World Bank's extreme poverty line of $3 a day, which is the published share for 2025. Your own household income is divided by the people in it, converted to dollars, and placed on that line. Your income is not adjusted for local prices, so your place is approximate, give or take a few. Gapminder's four income levels ($2, $8 and $32 a day) are drawn under the line at the places the model gives them.
Hand it back. A country is drawn with probability equal to its share of the world's births. Then a sex (48.7 per cent girls), a town or countryside setting (the country's urban share), and a household income from that country's curve, nudged up for towns and down for the countryside. Each line of the life (surviving to five, electricity, water, cooking, enough to eat, school, internet, flying) is a coin toss whose odds start from that country's national figure and are shifted by the household's place inside the country. Life length is the country's life expectancy plus up to five years. The comparison table at the end uses national figures on both sides, not the coin tosses. Treat a drawn life as a likelihood, not a record.
What we can afford, It moves, Half of us. Published figures only, each with its source and year beside it. Where the sources use different years or definitions, the page says so.
The live counters. A yearly figure divided evenly over the year, counting from midnight, from 1 January, or from the moment you opened the page. Nothing is live; nothing is measured.
What is not here. Nothing is weighted for age, education, ethnicity or anything beyond country, sex, income and town or countryside. The model is deliberately simple so that every step can be read in one page. If you can improve it, write to erik@understorymarkets.com.
201 rows, 16 columns, with the source of every column in the header.