I don’t like using terms such as fortunate. It implies that luck is a genuine influence on a person’s outcomes in life, whether that be positive or negative. Luck, good or bad, does not exist. However, if life is a lottery then every single individual who has been born in the twentieth century or later has hit it luckier than they could ever imagine. Those who were born in a western nation during the same period are even luckier, yet so many people aren’t just ignorant of their ‘good fortune’, they’re bitter, pathetic, resentful and ungrateful.
What are the chances of being born in modern times, or even better, being born in a western country in modern times? That is an astronomically difficult probability to determine. Especially for an uneducated high school dropout who works in a supermarket, such as myself, but I’m going to give it a go.
Let us start by reviewing the number of people who have ever been born on earth. Of course, this is going to be highly theoretical and I am indebted to scientists who are willing to put their reputations on the line. If I make a guess and it is wrong by several country miles, nobody is going to care except for a few dozen sad jerks on New Zealand Twitter. Toshida Kaneda, Technical Director of Demographic Research for the Population Reference Bureau is a doctor of sociology. Carl Haub is a Demographer Emeritus for the Population Reference Bureau. They’ve invested years of their life and their personal reputations drawing conclusions from tedious research, while all I have to do is google their conclusions to appear relatively intelligent.
In 1995, the PRB believed Homo sapiens (the species of mammal you and I are) could be traced back to 50,000 years prior to the birth of Jesus Christ. However, there have been multiple discoveries since that time that indicate this species is four times older than the original estimates.
Before I begin flailing attempts at telling you how ‘fortunate’ you are to be who you are, where you are and when you are, take a few moments to meditate, breathe in and out slowly, deeply, selfishly, like all the air on the earth is yours alone, and contemplate the exponential growth in knowledge you have had the privilege of witnessing within the lifespan of an adolescent. Then, if you still resent other identity groups and generations, punch yourself in the face repeatedly before I reach over there and do it for you.
The Population Reference Bureau, based on scientific research and hypotheses since 1995, now places the origin of humanity at approximately 100 times further back than the alleged birth of Jesus Christ. I’d prefer to say 202,000 years ago but Christianity won the chronology of history somewhere between the upside-down crucifixion of Paul and the fall of the Roman Empire so for the sake of simplicity I’m going to concede that argument. I’ll get my own back one day.
117 billion is now the estimate of the number of Homo sapiens ever alive in the previous 200,000 years. Demographic modelling is part guesswork and part social science. Demography has only been a conceptual reality for approximately 2020 years and for a significant proportion of that time is sketchy at best. Remember the chronology of humanity is based upon the birth of the apparent Son of God, and some of his most devoted followers believe the Earth was created by God 4,000 years prior to Jesus’ birth.
The number of people who had been born by 1950, which I would consider to be the beginning of the modern age, post the horrors of the Second World War, is estimated to be 107.9 billion. The estimate of total people born by 2020 was 116.8 billion. Therefore your chances of being born between 1950 and 2020 is 8%. However, the percentage of those 8% born into the wealthy western world is far, far smaller.
This is where it gets extremely complicated because some countries which were starving communist nightmares in the 1950s are now economic superpowers in their own right, such as China. Therefore, for the sake of simplicity, I believe it is most practical to review the global population at the beginning of each decade since 1950 and then take the proportion of people living in extreme poverty (the equivalent of $US1.90 per day).
| TOTAL POP BILLIONS | POVERTY BILLIONS | NOT POVERTY BILLIONS | % IN POVERTY | % OF 117 BILLION | |
| 1950 | 2.52 | 1.60 | 0.92 | 63.50% | 0.77% |
| 1960 | 3.03 | 1.60 | 1.39 | 54.70% | 1.20% |
| 1970 | 3.69 | 1.77 | 1.92 | 47.83% | 1.64% |
| 1980 | 4.44 | 1.92 | 2.52 | 43.24% | 2.15% |
| 1990 | 5.31 | 1.90 | 3.41 | 35.78% | 2.91% |
| 1999 | 6.05 | 1.73 | 4.32 | 28.60% | 3.69% |
| 2005 | 6.52 | 1.35 | 5.17 | 20.71% | 4.42% |
| 2010 | 6.93 | 1.09 | 5.84 | 15.73% | 4.99% |
| 2015 | 7.35 | 0.73 | 6.62 | 9.93% | 5.65% |
At this stage, it would appear just 5.65% of all people who have ever lived in human history have a standard of living above extreme poverty and they are alive in 2015. However, not being in extreme poverty isn’t the same as being wealthy. Living on $US2 a day isn’t a champagne lifestyle (a bottle of Moet bought from the official company’s website would take 21 days’ income to purchase).
In the previous forty years, the world has become so prosperous that it is possible to also determine that prosperity by the number of people living on more than $US10 per day.
| TOTAL POP BILLIONS | $10 OR UNDER BILLIONS | OVER $10 BILLIONS | %OVER $10 A DAY | % OF 117 BILLION | |
| 1985 | 4.84 | 3.62 | 1.19 | 24.59% | 0.77% |
| 1990 | 5.28 | 3.99 | 1.29 | 24.43% | 1.10% |
| 1995 | 5.71 | 4.40 | 1.31 | 22.94% | 1.12% |
| 2000 | 6.11 | 4.70 | 1.41 | 23.08% | 1.21% |
| 2005 | 6.51 | 4.82 | 1.69 | 25.96% | 1.44% |
| 2010 | 6.92 | 4.81 | 2.11 | 30.49% | 1.80% |
| 2015 | 7.34 | 4.74 | 2.6 | 35.42% | 2.22% |
| 2017 | 7.51 | 4.68 | 2.83 | 37.68% | 2.42% |
Just 2.22% of all people that have ever lived were alive in 2015 and lived on an income of more than $US10 per day. So, the odds of you being alive in this modern world and living on more than $US10 per day are approximately 1 in 43; a bit worse than the odds of winning 4 free lines on a lotto ticket in New Zealand. Still, even $US10 a day is far less than what a New Zealander on an unemployment benefit receives ($US25.20 as of 2021) and the recipients of that largesse still complain it is too little.
In the United States of America, 310 million out of 320 million people earned at least $US10 per day. The odds of being alive in the United States in 2015 and earning over $US10 per day, out of the 117 billion people that have ever lived is infinitesimal. Just 0.27% of all humanity or 1 in 370. That is similar to the odds of winning $22 in the New Zealand lottery.
There is a good chance that if you’re reading this article, you are reading it in New Zealand, a country of approximately 5.1 million people in which virtually everyone lives on at least $US10 a day. Being alive in 2015 in New Zealand, out of all the people who have ever lived in the history of humanity, makes you one of just 0.004%. The odds of that happening are 1 in 23,256 (winning $57 on Lotto four times).
However, I haven’t yet concluded pointing out just how lucky you are to be alive in the modern age (2015 are the most recent consistent figures available.). Those figures are taken from the total number of people ever born and therefore the assumption is that you have actually been born at all. The actual chance of ever existing, never mind living in a wealthy nation in modern times, is an entirely different ball game. Oh, no no. I’ve got some more gratitude heading your way. Females have approximately six million eggs while in the fetal stage, though this drops to one million by birth, decreasing further to 300,000 upon reaching puberty. Only 300 to 400 will be ovulated during a woman’s reproductive lifetime.
This was actually where it got extremely complicated, beyond measuring the average number of children had per woman throughout history (a couple of hours of research determined this was never going to be possible to measure). In frustration, I looked at what other people have determined to be the odds of being born and even this estimate was split by disputes about whether we are determining the odds of any human being born (which required a solid number of births per woman throughout history) or if this is about the odds of YOU being born. Estimating these odds required a crash course in human biology.
What comes first? The egg or the sperm? The egg exists within your mother while she is a fetus in your grandmother. It is tempting to suggest that we are all eggs before we are fertilised but even though that has an element of truth to it, you don’t become you until your egg is fertilised by the sperm and if a different sperm reaches that egg, it will be fertilised and born as someone else completely. In the same way, an identical twin or your siblings are a lot like you but aren’t actually you.
As so many of the millions of eggs carried by the female exist while she is a fetus in her mother’s uterus, and continue to decrease prior to puberty, followed by the eggs that never made it through ovulations and died in menopause onward, then using the estimate of 300 eggs that do make it through the ovulatory process while legal to reproduce is the most logical starting point for the determining the odds of you being born because the others are all essentially useless to this equation.
Males produce 525 billion sperm across their lifetime but assuming these only attempted fertilising your mother’s eggs during the period in which she is fertile, without it being statutory rape (an average of 24 years), while also assuming the male lives to the average age of life expectancy in New Zealand (82.36 years), then 174.3 billion sperm will be propelled at your mothers 300 eggs throughout an average fertility life cycle.
Based on that information, the odds of you being born you, are as low as 1 in 581 million. I have seen other estimates, including one given by a motivational Ted Talk in 2011 claiming the odds of you being born you are as low as 1 in 400 quadrillion, however, it uses wide-ranging assumptions about the solidity of your family tree all the way back to your first ancestor not being broken which is nonsense because by the time we are determining the odds of you being born you, every other factor stretching into the past has already come true.
The chances of winning the NZ Powerball are one in 38.3 million. Being born as you are is as unlikely as winning the NZ Powerball fifteen times. So when life gets you down, as it does all of us, it doesn’t hurt to reflect on the fact that the odds are 580,999,999 to 1 that you’d never know what it is to feel down.