Where you are born is more predictive of your future than any other factor

I’m extremely lucky, I was raised in projects at an early age in an absolutely horrible area and went through middle school and high school there (mother eventually moved out of the projects but in the same city). Random beatings were common once you neared your teen years, I was physically attacked many times just because I was white I guess (judging by the racial words said towards me).<p>But yeah, most people do not do well in life there, they are stuck in a cycle of violence, drugs, and other destructive behavior that they never recover from. It makes absolutely no sense how I was able to make it out and end up doing very well in life.<p>I want to help others break free from the cycle of self destruction but it’s very hard unless you are with them daily.<p>Anyways, to this day I’m thankful for John Carmack for giving me that spark of interest in computers.

I was born into a somewhat affluent family, in a somewhat affluent area, and went to somewhat affluent schools, and unsurprisingly I have a pretty decent life where I can afford what I want. It was never a question of &quot;if&quot; I get to go to college, but instead &quot;what college are you going to?&quot;, and even though I dropped out, I was still able to find a decent-paying job in tech.<p>Somehow I convinced myself that because I introduced one level of adversity into my life (dropping out), that I was special and had completely earned all my success, and that people who weren&#x27;t as successful as me just didn&#x27;t work hard enough.<p>It wasn&#x27;t until I met my wife, who is smarter than me an also a harder worker, but was born into a poor family, that I realized how silly my viewpoint was. Despite being very well-read and intelligent, she was working as a cashier at McDonalds to help support her mother and sister, living in a more impoverished suburb of Dallas, TX. It wasn&#x27;t until we were married that she was able to go to college.<p>Even she had it easier than someone born in, say, Uganda, but seeing all this made me realize that while, yes, I have worked hard to get where I am, I shouldn&#x27;t pretend that it was <i>all</i> me.

I don’t like how this article spins that doing housework is like a degenerate or bad thing for a woman to do. More housework = more inequality. Uh, ok.<p>It has to be done. That’s how teamwork, works.

The kids you grew up with or were friends in school with highly impact this as well.<p>Friends with the weird kid that just ate his boogers all day? You guys are probably working at McDonalds together. Hang around the stoners that never got their acts together? You might have ended up the same way.<p>But if you hung out with the kid who went to college? You might have decided to go to the same college and maybe got an internship as his dad&#x27;s company. Maybe his name was Steve, and you guys took a shared love for electronics and started your own company.<p>So think about this when you decide to buy a house, if you have kids. Your kids neighbors might be the biggest influence on the rest of their lives. Imagine if you had grown up one town over, or on the other side of the tracks, but didn&#x27;t because your mom liked the kitchen layout in the house you grew up in.

Does anyone else have a problem with an American billionaire deciding which worldview should be exported to the world? I&#x27;m sure the Gates have only the best intentions, but that doesn&#x27;t mean that their particular brand of philanthropy is inherently the best solution to the diverse needs of the world&#x27;s extremely disparate population.

Here we have a data-driven article outlining problems in equality of opportunity for humans across the globe, some encouraging success stories and progress, and ambitions to work on fixing scenarios where there&#x27;s less success, or the change isn&#x27;t fast enough. The motivation of such an article seems clear and obvious - those with the resources, ability, and of course their own altruistic motivations will have to work on finding and implementing solutions to the problem, that is, by reducing and removing the barriers that exist, especially due to geography and gender.<p>What&#x27;s much less clear to me are comments about this article that aim to diminish it, or one-off examples to supposedly refute it. Maybe you disagree with the article, and if so, provide data-driven sources to provide us with an alternate perspective that we can evaluate and discuss.<p>Perhaps you have read about some of the solutions that help accelerate the move towards equality, and you wish to share them here. Perhaps you have other suggestions for making the world a better place in our collective future.

I see race* to be a very prominent factor in these charts.<p>On one hand I would like to agree, but on the other I would like to respectfully remind my western friends of the existence of eastern Europe(especially Moldova) and the Balkans, where let&#x27;s just say that white privilege is not that apparent.<p>*dirty word for me personally. There&#x27;s one race - the human race.

As cynical as it may sound, we are unequal once we are conceived in our mother&#x27;s womb. An educated, healthy, grown-up mother has anticipated that moment with great sentimentality and does her best to ensure the best for the baby during the whole course of the pregnancy. Neglected, underweight, malnourished children from less responsible mothers are easy to spot even during their infant period. This is your real start which determines much of your mental and physical health for your while life.<p>Healthy, mentally-stable parents are most likely to have healthy and mentally-stable kids which is the number one prerequisite for enjoying and succeeding in life.

Of course who your daddy is is that other really predictive factor, and Gates could have been born in the US and be white, having a dad with a couple of million in the bank surely didn&#x27;t hurt. It rates a mention in the first paragraph but it isn&#x27;t reflected elsewhere in the text or the graphics. And if it were it would look like Bill started out from the top of a hill and slid down to the goal of being wealthy rather easily. Of course it was still hard work, but not more of it and not harder than plenty of others that tried just as hard but who did not have wealth to start with.

The title of this article is &quot;EXAMINING INEQUALITY HOW GEOGRAPHY AND GENDER STACK THE DECK FOR (OR AGAINST) YOU&quot;<p>The title of this HN post is the header of one section of this article. It should be changed to the article&#x27;s title.

The article speaks about Chad. A country where the birth rate is around 6 children &#x2F; woman. I am a developer who comes from a similar country (5.7 c &#x2F; w) or we are the second poorest country. One thing we have in common with the people who grew up in gethos&#x2F;projets is violence. It pushes us to stop thinking about what we need beyond surviving... We are wasting time fighting against diseases, addictions, wars (gethos gangs are small compared to the war in Chad, Yemen, Middle East!) or peoples who bicker for $ 10 ... because 10 dollars in our countries is about life or death!<p>Nobody would ever thought that I will be one day (I who was a refugee for 4 years) an experienced developer working internationally... And the funny thing about all this is that it&#x27;s UNICEF who gave me this chance [0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.unicef.org&#x2F;innovation&#x2F;open-source-tech-in-the-burundi-lab-and-beyond-a-junior-programmers-story&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.unicef.org&#x2F;innovation&#x2F;open-source-tech-in-the-...</a>

The bigger question in my mind is how much geography matters inside one country. For comparison&#x27;s sake, I think the point of the article works even better to compare a woman in America to a woman in Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, it&#x27;s a bit apples and oranges -- the kingdom explicitly disallows women to do many things without a man, whereas if there are effects like that in America still, they&#x27;re definitely much more subtle than being enacted in law. So how does the apples to apples comparison work out? Does geography play nearly as large a role in a country? Does it play as large a role in a smaller, more homogenous country (Sweden, say) than in America?

Americans think progress can fix inequality because we live in a thinly populated country with lots of resources. In particular, since 1800, mostly European immigrants converted the economy from hunting&#x2F;gathering and neolithic agriculture to modern agriculture.<p>Most parts of the world for most of history have lived at the Malthusian limit with diets ranging from lavish to starvation within the society.

What if you make it past your teens?<p>Think about all of those people who immigrated to the US in the 60s-70s (born in the 1940-50s). A lot of them spoke almost no English and did it with almost no money in their pocket.<p>But they thrived. There&#x27;s so many successful small businesses in the US ran by people of that generation who immigrated (and now their kids). At least in NY.<p>When you&#x27;re put into situations like that there&#x27;s no time to think negatively, be anxious, depressed or have other issues that plague so many people today. Your mental health is a big dictator of your future and there&#x27;s for sure lots of chemical issues involved but I do think in a decent number of cases your environment plays a big role -- but in this case, being in an environment of change &#x2F; non-extreme comfort from early on (teens and lower) might be an astronomically sized benefit because it sets you up to think in a different way for the rest of your life.

Relevant [0]: &quot;The life chances approach suggests that status is not entirely achieved, but is, to some extent, ascribed. Overall, in societies emphasizing ascription, opportunity is relatively low and status (in the sense of prestige in the community) is often inherited. This means that people are, effectively, given their status as a result of the group into which they are born, rather than earning it entirely on merit. Ascriptive qualities such as race&#x2F;ethnicity, gender, and class of origin can all affect one&#x27;s life chances. In all societies parents pass on whatever advantages and disadvantages they have to their children&quot;.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Life_chances" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Life_chances</a><p>edit: typo

This might have been true in the past, but I absolutely no longer believe this.<p>What you know, what information you have, the network you have is more predictive of your future than any other factor. Most of my mistakes in life have been that of being ignorant, just learning bout something much later in life. Something that some people had passed on to them by their parents etc, but I had to discover for myself.<p>Information is the great equalizer. There are of course folks who get information but don&#x27;t act on it. They haven&#x27;t received the information that they can move mountains if they stay persistent and act.

And the more children the U-countries give birth to, the luckier my children will be. Isn&#x27;t that funny?<p>It&#x27;s like humanity is intentionally making the odds worse for their own children, and noone is intervening.

I find it hilariously patronizing how they explain things in this article, did they seriously need to mine all this data and do all this research to come to these so obvious conclusions? Poverty, Lack of healthcare and education, clean water, the sins of generations and the cycle that proceeds it, its the basis of every ghetto in the world. Really dont understand what The Gates Foundation is trying to get across with this piece. He has the power, the means, the influence to single handedly change the situation in Chad with zero help from anybody, all they have to do is choose to do it. Yet here we are with all this data and metrics, was this seriously an &quot;ah-ha!&quot; moment for them?! If so, they seriously are detached as the 1%.

I find it strange that the Gates always talk about lives that are &quot;healthy and productive&quot;. Can&#x27;t it be &quot;healthy and happy&quot;? Why should anyone seek productiveness?

Who give birth to you more in many places. Not where.

Isn&#x27;t this a case of driving using the rear view mirror? If we had done this analysis in 1965 I would bet fair that the biggest challenges would have been for people born in southern china; governance (your government would kill you at any moment), nutrition (mass starvation), education (not much of that), disease (plague, cholera, smallpox)..<p>The marvel is that China broke the shackles.

<p><pre><code> We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the secret sits in the middle, and knows.</code></pre>

is this the same &quot;think tank&quot; that wanted every elementary school child in America to have standardized, written test scores, maintained in (their) central database?

Not sure why they put Melinda&#x27;s gender as a handicap, it allowed her to get things handed to her on a platter by Bill. She is now loved and famous thanks to spending Bill&#x27;s money on charity without taking any of the downsides and hate related to starting a company and fiercely clawing yourself to the top like Bill did.<p>I agree that being a woman is a handicap in many situations, but saying that Melinda had to make more sacrifices to get where she is than Bill is laughable.

so, if any wonder why people are ready to risk their life to migrate...

&quot;You are a product of your environment&quot; --Clement Stone <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;yPhyn" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;yPhyn</a>

What does this say of the army of homeless in California? Are they just &#x27;doing it wrong&#x27;?

I don&#x27;t like how this kind of thinking puts Western life on a pedestal as better than everywhere else.

This is why open migration is: 1) inevitable (people in every country are becoming well aware about the difference in opportunities and quality of life), and 2) is a good thing.

Well, that&#x27;s a lot of IQ &quot;truthers&quot; in these here comments.

I seem to remember some story of a dinner party with Gates where he was bragging his intelligence would have allowed him to rise to the top in whatever culture he was born into. Can&#x27;t find a link to the anecdote however so maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.

It must be a great comfort to all the people Bill Gates trod over to see the great credit he&#x27;s getting today for giving a little back.

&quot;Men enroll in college, women don&#x27;t&quot; &quot;in every single country&quot;. And yet in lots of Western countries, more women enroll in college than men.<p>I find it weird when articles that claim science make claims that are easily challenged by widely available and commonly known data.