Born ThenLife in the 1950s
Be born somewhere between 1950 and 1959, weighted by real births, and live five lives from that year on.
The numbers
The world had about 2.7 billion people, and about 0.98 billion babies were born in the 1950s. A child born then could expect, on world average, about 52 years of life; 22% of children died before turning five. Women had about 5.5 children each. Roughly 59% of adults could read, and 29% of people lived in towns and cities. The places with the most births were China (24%), India (17%), USA (4%), Indonesia (3%), Russia (3%).
From Gapminder and the World Bank, averaged over the world and weighted by births; before 1950 most are estimates. How it works
What happened
- Great Migration of Black Americans 1916–1970
- Bracero program and Mexican migration to the United States 1942–2007
- Apartheid 1948–1994
- Division of Germany 1949–1990
- Korean War 1950–1953
- Italian economic miracle and the move north 1950–1970
- Egyptian revolution of 1952 and land reform 1952–1961
- Mau Mau uprising and the Kenya Emergency 1952–1960
- Algerian War and French conscription 1954–1962
- Japanese postwar economic boom 1955–1973
- Vietnam War 1955–1975
- Great Leap Forward famine 1959–1961