Every life starts somewhere.
Hurry up, your plane is waiting to take you around the world in 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.
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. Three things, and none of it leaves this browser.
If your parents support you, count their whole household and their income.
Euros and pounds are converted to dollars at the September 2026 rate. The incomes you are compared with are adjusted for local prices and yours is not, so treat your place as approximate, give or take a few.
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.
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.
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 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.
Since you opened this page: 0
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, January 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).
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 118,000 every day.
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 twelve problems. Nobody can carry all of them. Pick the one that stayed with you, and one thing you will do about it.
The best move is different for each of you.
The twelve stops of the walk, then home. The other routes are below them.
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. That instinct is the whole argument. The thing you would not trade away was handed to you.
This page is not asking you to feel guilty. Guilt is a poor instrument and it wears off by Thursday. What the numbers do support is smaller and harder to shake: the single largest factor in how your life goes was settled before you had a name.
If you would rather move a number than think about one, the shortest honest list is GiveWell's top charities.
"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
Behind every number below is a decision somebody made, or did not make, multiplied by millions of people.
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.
All figures are rounded, and each one names where it comes from.