Your birthplace determines your wealth

Washington

LIFE is a lottery, and the most important part isn't how smart you are or even who your parents are. It's where you were born.

That, at least, is what economist Branko Milanovic, writing in the May issue of The Review of Economics and Statistics, found when he broke down how much people in different countries make at different income percentiles. That lets us figure out, for example, that the bottom one per cent in Germany are better off than all but the top 40 per cent in China. And that more than half of what you earn is determined by the country you live in. But really, when you consider the fact that only 3 per cent of the world's population are immigrants, it's determined by the country you were born in.