Silver Keskküla served Skype as the first researcher of the core team. He has lived in 9 countries and is co-founder of Teleport, where he helps people to discover their best place to live and work.
97% of people born tomorrow will be in a country that is authoritarian, communist, doesn’t support same sex marriage, does not allow abortion, supports capital punishment or has seen over ten thousand deaths in recent armed conflicts. Good luck!
Let me illustrate that for you:
I was born in Estonia. Based on the population size and the birth rates, the probability of this happening to the next person born on Earth is 0.01%. Makes me feel pretty special right now, but in 1979 when I was born, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union – a communist state. In fact, the probability of the next person being born into a communist state is 14% right now. One in five people will be born into an authoritarian state. I was lucky enough to see the system change when growing up, but it still begs the question -
Should one be a slave to the coincidence of being born in one place for the rest of their life?
I crunched some data to show you the first 10 countries one is most likely to be born in given population sizes and accounting for birth rates (2013-2015 data):
Do you see what I’m getting at?
I see being born somewhere as a random coincidence and based on statistics, most people do not end up in countries as progressive as the ones where most of the biased set of my beloved readers are at. In fact, they are doing much worse:
- 54% of people born tomorrow will be in a country that still exercises capital punishment
- 53% of people born tomorrow will be in a country where women do not enjoy the right to decide over their body (abortion) unless sexually abused (did you get the irony in this paraprosdokian oxymoron?)
- 45% of people born tomorrow will be in a country where the majority of men do not enjoy the right to decide over their body (circumcision more than 50% prevalent)
- 16% of people born tomorrow will be in a country that has seen armed conflict killing at least 1K-100K people recently
- 22% of people born tomorrow will be in a country with mandatory military service
- 45% of people born tomorrow will be in a country that does not allow dual citizenship
- 14% of people born tomorrow will be in a country that completely forbids, does not allow or makes it very difficult/humiliating/expensive to renounce your citizenship
- About 1 in 200 people will be born in a country where women have no right to vote
I could go on, but instead you’re welcome to play around with this interactive map to see more of it quantified:
When the environment is (or turns) difficult, you have a couple of choices of what to do. I’ll write all about it next week in the second part of this post.
See you out there and good luck to those born tomorrow!
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