life. scored.

Residence sets a baseline from its World Bank income tier. High-income country → high base; low-income or conflict-affected → low base.

Why this weight: The largest single predictor of lifetime outcomes is where you live — World Bank income tiers span a ~60× range in GNI per capita, dwarfing every behavioral lever in this book. 2.4× the baseline is, if anything, conservative.

A family financial floor raises your position. No clean public dataset maps this to an individual, so the weight is a flagged guess, not a measurement.

Why this weight: Chetty's mobility work shows parental resources rival education's effect on adult outcomes — but because no dataset maps it to an individual, this flagged guess is weighted at 1.6×, below country, above everything behavioral.

Children of degree-holding parents are far likelier to earn degrees themselves and start with more navigational capital. You didn't choose this.

Why this weight: First-generation status roughly halves college-completion odds (NCES), but part of its effect routes through the education rule — weighted down to 0.8× to avoid double-counting.

Your passport determines visa-free access to work, study, and flee. Derived from your country of residence in this model.

Why this weight: Binding only at borders and mostly latent day-to-day — 0.6× despite the huge Henley spread, because the option value is rarely exercised.

The census tract you grew up in measurably shifts adult income. Self-assessed band here (low / average / high opportunity area).

Why this weight: Opportunity Atlas tract effects are causal but smaller than country-level differences — 0.8×, tied with parental education.

Clean water and sanitation is the gateway condition for health and human capital. 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water; lacking it is among the strongest predictors of preventable disease burden and stunted development.

Why this weight: Safe water is the single most fundamental infrastructure condition — it enables every other human-capital outcome. At 1.4× the income baseline (weight 14), it sits just below country/residence in the starting-point tier. The 2.2B statistic (JMP) makes the global stakes concrete.

Reliable electricity and internet access enable education, economic participation, and communication. ~675 million people lack electricity; ~2.6 billion lack meaningful internet access.

Why this weight: Electricity + internet access together unlock education, telehealth, remote work, and banking — each of which routes into this rulebook. At 1.2× (weight 12), it sits just below clean water and alongside food security. Electricity alone (without internet) is scored at 0.5 because connectivity doubles the impact.

Food insecurity impairs cognitive development, immune function, and labor productivity. FAO documents that chronic undernourishment actively destroys human capital — justifying a negative floor. ~733 million people face hunger globally.

Why this weight: Famine and chronic hunger actively destroy human capital (FAO SOFI), qualifying for a negative floor under the constrained-subtractive principle. Weight 12 (1.2×) equals utilities; food security and connectivity are co-equal prerequisites below clean water and peace.

Active armed conflict destroys human capital, displaces populations, and collapses institutions. Fragile states impair property rights and contract enforcement. The World Bank WGI documents that governance quality strongly predicts long-run development outcomes.

Why this weight: Active conflict is the most destructive starting condition catalogued here — it negates every other investment. Negative floor of −0.3 (the deepest in the rulebook) is justified by UCDP/WGI documentation of conflict destroying human capital. Weight 14 (1.4×) matches clean water as a co-equal gateway condition.

Insurers price you off remaining life expectancy: younger means more runway, and women outlive men by ~5 years on average. Pure actuarial position — no virtue involved.

Why this weight: Actuarial position is priced exactly as legibly as income by the insurance industry — weighted equal to the baseline at 1.0×.

Insurers price a tobacco/nicotine class off a cotinine test, not just cigarettes: vaping, cigars, chew, and patches all count. Never-users score full; former recover most of it; current score zero here.

Why this weight: A ~10-year life-expectancy swing (CDC) — the single largest behavioral mortality factor, weighted equal to the baseline at 1.0×.

Scored against the 150-minutes-per-week guideline; saturates there — this model gives no extra credit for marathon volume.

Why this weight: Meeting the WHO guideline associates with 20–30% lower all-cause mortality — large, but smaller than smoking's swing, so 0.8×.

Heavy drinking carries large measured mortality and financial costs; moderate use a smaller penalty; none scores full.

Why this weight: Heavy use is a leading preventable cause of death, but the population-level swing is smaller than smoking or inactivity — 0.6×.

7–9 hours scores full; 6 or 10 hours partial; outside that, the short-sleep mortality association bites.

Why this weight: Demoted to 0.3×: no life insurer prices sleep duration, and the 7–9h association is heavily confounded with everything else on this page (exercise, alcohol, BMI). Kept as a small controllable nudge, not a load-bearing rule.

Being uninsured is both a health risk and the most common path to catastrophic financial shock. Controllable only to the degree coverage is affordable where you live — flagged in the description.

Why this weight: Coverage removes an uncapped financial tail risk (medical debt is a leading bankruptcy driver) — 0.8×.

Insurers still price by BMI band, so it appears here — scored as they score it, not as an endorsement of the measure.

Why this weight: Underwriters genuinely price it, but the measure itself is blunt (see caveat) — weighted at 0.6× accordingly.

Net worth against the median for your age band. Below the median: a linear drag, floored at half this weight. Above it, points grow as the square root of your wealth multiple — quadruple your money to double your points — uncapped, because the real world does not cap the advantage of money.

Why this weight: Stock beats flow: wealth absorbs shocks income cannot, and SCF gaps between wealth deciles exceed income gaps — 1.6× the baseline, uncapped above because the world does not cap it.

Debt scored as leverage against income, benchmarked to the lending world's ~43% affordability line. Zero debt scores best; the same asset bought on a loan drags here.

Why this weight: The lending world's primary gate (the CFPB 43% line) — 1.4×. The only symmetric rule in the book: the cited system punishes exactly as hard as it rewards.

The number lenders actually pull — the single most legible 'life score' there is. Scored against what a score band costs you in the real world: below ~580 you're subprime (denied, or charged the most), and the best rates plateau around 760, so points saturate there. This one rule stands in for payment history and utilization (its two biggest factors) plus credit age, mix, and inquiries.

Why this weight: A major legible gate — it sets the price of a mortgage, a car, a deposit, sometimes a job. Weighted 1.4×, and it consolidates what were two separate FICO-component rules (payment history + utilization).

Months of expenses covered by liquid savings, scored against the standard 3-month test. Saturates at 3 — this measures shock absorption, not hoarding.

Why this weight: The Fed's own resilience test: the 3-month line is what separates a setback from a spiral — 1.0×.

Household income, sized to the people it supports by the OECD square-root scale, against the median US household. Half marks at the size-adjusted median; above it, points grow as the square root of your multiple, uncapped — see the net-worth rule for why. More dependents on the same income lower the per-person figure — exactly how the poverty thresholds and lenders treat a household, not a verdict on having a family.

Why this weight: THE BASELINE (1.0×). Income is the dimension every other system prices most legibly; every other weight in this book is a stated deviation from this one. Sized to the household so a paycheck stretched across more people counts for less — the way the poverty line already does.

Owning is the dominant US wealth-building vehicle — and gatekept by everything above. Renters get partial credit; this measures system position, not virtue.

Why this weight: The wealth effect is already counted in net worth; this 0.6× prices only the access premium to the main US wealth escalator.

No bank account means check-cashing fees, money orders, and no credit-building rail — a measured tax on being poor. Underbanked (account, but relying on payday/check-cashing services) pays part of it.

Why this weight: The FDIC's measured poverty premium — fees where wealth earns interest — at 0.6× the baseline, kept low because its dollar magnitude is small even though its direction is vicious.

The labor market prices each rung: no diploma is actively penalized (unemployment runs roughly twice the bachelor's-holder rate), each step up narrows the gap, and the graduate premium over a bachelor's is field-dependent — so this rule caps at the bachelor's rung. 'Controllable' only if the time and tuition were affordable to you.

Why this weight: A ~60% earnings premium compounding over a working life — 1.2× the baseline. The negative floor exists because the market genuinely penalizes no-diploma, not merely fails to reward it.

Employed or self-employed scores full; students and retirees partial (different life phase, not failure); unemployed zero — which is how every lender reads it.

Why this weight: The income flow is already counted by the baseline rule; this 0.8× prices the status gate every lender and landlord reads first.

Whether your field is projected to grow or shrink — BLS publishes ten-year projections for every occupation. Self-assessed band here.

Why this weight: Ten-year BLS projections are directional, not destiny — 0.6×.

Regular contact with people you are close to. The mortality effect of isolation rivals smoking in meta-analysis — the most underpriced rule in this book.

Why this weight: Holt-Lunstad's ~50% survival effect rivals smoking cessation — weighted equal to the baseline and to smoking at 1.0×, the most underpriced rule in the book.

Married/partnered people show better longevity and household finances in the data — partly pooling, partly selection.

Why this weight: The longevity association is real but heavily selection-confounded (see caveat) — discounted to 0.6×.

Parents show modestly lower mortality in old age — a Swedish registry cohort of ~1.4M people tracked from 60 found roughly a 2-year (men) / 1.5-year (women) life-expectancy edge that widens with age, consistent with adult children providing late-life support. Scored as a mild positive that saturates by two or three kids; childless sits at a neutral half, not a deficit. The financial cost of children is counted separately, in the income rule.

Why this weight: The old-age-mortality association is real but small and selection-confounded (see caveat) — 0.6×, matched to partnership, the other family-ties rule.

Regular volunteering correlates with health and well-being outcomes — and is the closest thing to a real-world "social karma" ledger.

Why this weight: The smallest sourced effect in the book — 0.4×, the floor for sourced rules.

At-fault accidents and moving violations in the last 3 years, scored the way an auto insurer rates you. Clean record full; each incident bites.

Why this weight: Insurer-priced with a 3–5 year decay — 0.6×. Mildly subtractive because license points literally subtract.

Employers and landlords screen public profiles, but no public dataset quantifies the effect on outcomes — so the weight is a flagged guess.

Why this weight: Survey evidence only, no outcome dataset — speculative, so pinned to the 0.4× floor.

Where you sleep is the gateway condition for everything else scored here. Stable housing scores full; doubled-up or eviction-threatened partial; unhoused subtracts — because the systems above (credit, employment, health) all actively punish it.

Why this weight: Eviction sits upstream of job loss, credit destruction, and health collapse — weighted with education at 1.2×. The negative floor qualifies under the subtractive principle: every cited system actively punishes housing loss.

A record roughly halves employer callbacks in audit studies. Scored as the labor market scores it — which is exactly the kind of opaque penalty this app exists to expose.

Why this weight: The callback-halving effect is enormous, but the measure is binary and inherits enforcement bias (see caveat) — held to 0.8× rather than weighted like the gate it really is.

Registered voters appear in civic data used by campaigns, jury pools, and some tenant screens; the personal-outcome effect is unquantified — flagged guess.

Why this weight: No outcome dataset ties registration to personal results — speculative, 0.4× floor.