About the data

How a life is generated

Every respawn is a chain of weighted random draws from real statistical distributions. Your country comes first, weighted by births per year — about 134.2 million across 216 countries and territories — not by population. Then sex (each country's sex ratio at birth), an urban or rural setting, and a household income sampled from the country's income distribution, modeled as lognormal from its average income and Gini index. Infant survival is drawn against the country's infant mortality rate.

Household attributes — electricity, drinking water, internet — and health at birth — low birth weight, stunting — start from national rates and are tilted by the sampled income percentile (richer households more likely to have access, less likely to face health risks). The tilt is calibrated so that averaged over all incomes, each country's national rate stays exact. Electricity uses the urban or rural rate matching the sampled setting.

A few lighter details ride along: blood type comes from a curated ABO/Rh profile for the country's broad region, twin odds from curated regional twinning rates (per baby born, so a twin delivery counts twice), and left-handedness is a flat 10.6% everywhere — one of the most stable statistics on Earth.

Every result shows its odds. The same link always regenerates the same person — a life is fully determined by its seed and the data version below. The prose sketch at the top of the card and the "compared to you" lines are derived from the sampled attributes (comparisons use your chosen country's medians from the same dataset); the combination odds treat religion, language, and income as independent within a country, which is a simplification.

Curated data

Three attributes have no clean global API and are curated by hand: religion (shares based on Pew Research Center's Global Religious Landscape estimates and national censuses), language at home (a deliberately coarse table of each country's most common primary languages), and given names (common names for recent newborns, drawn from national popular-name lists where they exist), blood types (regional ABO/Rh profiles from blood-service and donor data), and twin rates (regional twinning rates after Monden et al. 2021). These are honest approximations, not precise statistics — names in particular are illustrative and sampled uniformly.

Sources

All indicators come from the World Bank Open Data API, using the most recent available value per country (mostly 2024–2025). Births are derived as population × crude birth rate. Where a country lacks a value (notably the Gini index and schooling), the median of its region fills in. Expected years of school is the Human Capital Index measure — schooling by age 18, so it excludes tertiary education.

Data version: wb-2026-07.3

What this is — and isn't

These are statistical sketches, not predictions about any real person. National averages hide enormous variation within countries, and a modeled income says nothing about any individual household. Real people live behind every one of these numbers; the point is perspective, not caricature.