2.1 Not who you are, but where you are

If you want to predict someone's income, the most useful single fact about them isn't their education, their effort or their talent. It is the country they live in. The economist Branko Milanovic estimates that the country where a person lives explains about two-thirds of the variation in income between all people in the world. Max Roser of Our World in Data sums it up: what matters most is "not who you are, but where you are".

The differences in income become differences in health.

Lesson 1.1 used deaths before the age of 15 in 2021. Here we use deaths before the age of five in 2024, the measure most agencies track. Both tell the same story.

In the richest countries, maternal mortality has fallen about 300-fold over the past few generations. Very few women in the Netherlands die giving birth. Most of the world's maternal deaths happen where health systems are weakest.

Roser draws a further conclusion that is worth knowing because not everyone accepts it. He argues that the world is too poor for redistribution alone to end poverty. Only broad economic growth can make today's rich-country living standards available to everyone. Others put more weight on redistribution, trade rules or political change. Either way, the starting point is the same: where you are born shapes almost everything else.