Methodology & Data Sources — How MYRIAD Computes Your Parallel Lives

Data sources

MYRIAD builds on publicly documented statistical series: the UN World Population Prospects (life expectancy, fertility, births), the World Bank Open Data API (income, child mortality, urbanization, electricity, internet, homicide, poverty), the Maddison Project Database (historical GDP per capita), NCD-RisC (human height), Barro-Lee (education) and Our World in Data compilations (working hours and long-run series). Every dimension page names its source and links to it.

Historical estimates

For decades before consistent national statistics exist (roughly pre-1950), values are anchored to published regional historical estimates and rescaled to each country's modern observed level. These points are marked low confidence and shown as estimates. From 1960 onward, values come from or are calibrated against direct observations. Future decades (2030–2100) follow simple published trend rules and are marked as projections.

The Lottery Score

Your Lottery Score is your percentile among all humans ever born (an estimated 117 billion, following the Population Reference Bureau's methodology). We weight every (country, decade) birth cohort by its estimated number of births, score each cohort by a composite of living conditions (longevity, income, child survival, education, safety), and place your own birth cohort — adjusted by your inputs — within that distribution.

What MYRIAD is not

MYRIAD describes statistical averages of birth cohorts. It cannot describe any individual's actual fate, and no result should be read as a prediction. It is a tool for perspective, built with the best public data available.

Corrections

Found an error? Write to us via the contact page — corrections ship fast and are logged.