Born Then2008–2010
Life during the 2008 financial crisis
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
The collapse of the US housing bubble and of Lehman Brothers in 2008 set off a worldwide banking crisis and the deepest recession since the 1930s. Unemployment doubled in the US and parts of Europe; many families lost homes.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from our model, estimated from the sources.
Around the same time
- Bracero program and Mexican migration to the United States 1942–2007
- Apartheid 1948–1994
- Division of Germany 1949–1990
- Korean economic miracle 1962–1996
- Colombian armed conflict 1964–2016
- Migration to the Gulf 1973–2025
- China's reform and opening 1978–2015
- Soviet–Afghan War 1979–1989
- Iran–Iraq War 1980–1988
- One-child policy 1980–2015
- HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern and eastern Africa 1985–2015
- Collapse of the Soviet Union 1991–1998
- Rwandan genocide 1994
- 1997 Asian financial crisis 1997–1999
- Second Congo War 1998–2003
- War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) 2001–2021
- Iraq War 2003–2011
- 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami 2004
- Mexican drug war 2006–2025
- 2008 financial crisis 2008–2010
- Syrian civil war 2011–2024
- 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami 2011
- Rohingya genocide 2016–2017
- COVID-19 pandemic 2020–2022
- Myanmar civil war since the 2021 coup 2021–2025
- Russian invasion of Ukraine 2022–2025