Yesterday I was looking over some photos from my time in Arusha last year and it reinforced how lucky I am. Chances are, if you’re reading this you’re probably within the same socioeconomic stratum as me—somewhere around average American middle-class. Compared to the rest of the world, that’s a pretty privileged place.

By sheer luck, I happened to be born into these circumstances. I could have easily been born in Arusha and be struggling to get by. My education, my career options, my current prospects for getting through this global pandemic—a lot of it was determined at birth, by chance. A quick thought experiment to illustrate this:

The 5 most populous countries in the world are China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Pakistan. If you total their combined population you get 3,644,746,767, or 46.9% of the world’s population. What percentage of the 3.5 billion people living in these countries enjoy a standard of living equal to or greater than an average American middle-class household?

Well, the United States' total population of roughly 330 million people makes up less than 10 percent of the combined top 5 countries population total. So let’s pretend that half of the US population is in the middle class, and that there are some Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, and Pakistani citizens enjoying a similar standard of living (which there are, but not very many). This means we can very conservatively estimate that 7% of all the people living in the 5 most populous countries enjoy an American middle-class standard of living.

So I hit the jackpot! Of all the 3.5 billion people living in the 5 most populous countries on Earth, which makes up almost half of the world’s population, I’m one of the 7% who enjoys immediate privilege.

Let’s compare this to likelihood of being born in an extremely poor place like Arusha. Using any country listed in the top 10 on these 3 sites, here’s a quick and dirty list of 20 poverty-stricken countries and their population totals, in which you could safely say that if you’re among this group, you would suffer similar living conditions as those in Arusha:

Afghanistan - 38,928,346

Burundi - 11,890,784

Central African Republic - 4,829,767

Democratic Republic of the Congo - 89,561,403

Ethiopia - 114,963,588

Gambia - 2,416,668

Haiti - 11,402,528

Kyrgyzstan - 6,524,195

Madagascar - 27,691,018

Malawi - 19,129,952

Mozambique - 31,255,435

Niger - 24,206,644

Sierra Leone - 7,976,983

Somalia - 15,893,222

South Sudan - 11,193,725

Tajikistan - 9,537,645

Tanzania - 59,734,218

Uganda - 45,741,007

Uzbekistan - 33,469,203

Yemen - 29,825,964

Population total: 596,172,295

These 20 countries account for 7.6% of the world’s population. So I had a 7% chance of being born into a “middle-class” family compared to a 7.6% chance of inheriting extreme poverty. Most of the other 85 percentage points are places in the world that heavily skew toward poverty.

Yea, I got lucky. I think I can handle shelter-in-place here in sunny California. This is a very simplistic thought experiment with some methodological limitations, but you get the picture.

We can always be grateful. The world is so vast and so diverse, sometimes we don’t know how fortunate we can be. Maybe if we realize it, we’ll work to make it better for everyone.