An interactive model of structural opportunity
You did not choose your country, your family, your health, or the world you were born into. This project explores what those unchosen conditions mean for the structural possibilities of a life.
"What kind of society would you design if you did not know who you would be in it?"— John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
Draw a life from global birth probabilities. See where chance places you.
Enter your starting conditions and explore how your profile compares globally.
Place two profiles side by side. Change one variable and watch the gap appear.
Run simulations to find patterns across geography, wealth, sex, and cohort.
"No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits his more favourable starting place in society." — Rawls
The term "birth lottery" is metaphorical. No one is literally assigned a life at random. But starting conditions are unchosen — and they shape the structural probabilities of a life in ways that are profound and often invisible. This project makes those inequalities visible.
Draw a life weighted by global birth probabilities.
Enter your starting conditions to calculate your structural profile.
Place two birth profiles side by side and measure the structural gap.
Analysis across thousands of simulated lives — revealing patterns, not predictions.
Set a structural profile and see how the Starting Position Index changes across birth cohorts — revealing historical progress (or lack of it) in each country.
How many people globally are born into each structural opportunity band? This view makes the rarity labels concrete — a "highly favorable" profile is genuinely exceptional in global terms.
The ideas behind the Birth Lottery.
No one is literally assigned to a life at random. Each person is the result of a specific historical and biological chain. But no one chooses their starting conditions — their country, their family, their health, their historical moment. These conditions are unchosen and they matter enormously.
Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), proposed that we imagine designing a just society without knowing who we would be in it — our class, talent, nationality, or starting position. From behind this "veil of ignorance," we would choose fair principles because we could not assume we would land at the top. The Birth Lottery makes this thought experiment concrete with data.
"No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits his more favourable starting place in society."
The model does not claim you could have been literally anyone else. It shows how much your unchosen starting conditions shape the structural probabilities of a life.
How the model works, what it includes, and what it deliberately excludes.
Base scores come from each country's structural profile, then personal starting conditions apply adjustments. All scores are clamped to [0, 100].
| Variable | Dimensions affected | Max delta |
|---|---|---|
| Family wealth (low→high) | Health, education, economic, well-being, support | ±14 to ±18 |
| Early health (poor→excellent) | Health, education, economic, well-being | −18 to +14 |
| Parental education | Education, economic, support | ±10 |
| Family stability | Education, well-being, support | ±8 |
| Urban / rural | Education, economic, health | ±4 |
| Birth cohort | Education, health, autonomy | −4 to +7 |
| Sex × gender autonomy | Autonomy, economic, education | Varies by country |