Our individual stories play out amidst these major global changes and inequalities and it is these circumstances that largely determine how healthy, wealthy, and educated each of us will be in our own lives. Yes, our own hard work and life choices matter. But as we will see in the data, these matter much less than the one big thing over which we have no control: where and when we are born. This single, utterly random, factor largely determines the conditions in which we live our lives. Today’s global inequality is the consequence of two centuries of unequal progress. Some places have seen dramatic improvements, while others have not.
