How you can guarantee yourself entry
Everyone who has ever died gets three questions. Answer yes to all three and you are counted. Since 1981, income is judged about ten years before death, as a stand-in for the life you lived rather than the year you died. The rule applies in every era and every religion, back to the first humans.
Did you reach adulthood?
A child could not choose to keep or give away what it had, so children are never counted.
Were you over the bar?
Did you keep it?
Giving almost all of your wealth away, in life or in your will, gets you out. Almost all means 95% or more. It has to go to the poor or to charity, so leaving it to your children does not count.
Hell's admissions by era
| Era | Souls in hell | People who died | Over the bar | Adults among them | Gave it away |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Arrivals per year
What counts as rich
| Comfort | Prosperous household, about 70 CE | |
|---|---|---|
| Food | Bread, oil and wine every day, with meat on feast days and for guests | Fresh food of any kind in any season, kept in a fridge |
| Home | Stone house with several rooms around a courtyard | Private rooms with heating, a lock and a roof that never leaks |
| Water | Carried from a well or cistern by a servant | Hot and cold at the tap |
| Labor | One or two servants or slaves to cook, wash and carry | A washing machine, a stove and a delivery driver |
| Clothing | A spare tunic and a good cloak | A full closet |
| Light | Olive oil lamps, sparingly | Electric light in every room |
| Medicine | The best doctor money could buy, and no antibiotics | Antibiotics, vaccines and anesthesia |
| Country | People over the bar | Survey measures |
|---|
Who actually gave it away
We have found no dataset that measures this, so these rates are our best judgement. The evidence below shows only that such giving is rare. The rates by era are in the ledger above. Today's rate is low because most people over the bar are ordinary households with a home, a pension and children to leave it to.
The assumptions
The site reads these numbers from the same file the model uses, so what you see here is what ran. The counter uses the best guess for each. The era-by-era figures are in the ledger on the main page.
What moves the number most
Each row changes one assumption from its merciful value to its damning value and leaves the others at the best guess. The white tick is the best guess at the start of this year. These are illustrative ranges, not confidence intervals.
What this leaves out
- The model has no term for mercy. The passage goes on to say that all things are possible with God. We apply the camel line as a strict rule, as the site's premise requires.
- There is no good evidence for the popular story that the Needle's Eye was a small gate in Jerusalem, so we read the line at face value.
- The verse says rich man. Income data is per person in a household, so wives and other dependants count the same as the head of the household, even in centuries when they controlled nothing. Counting only men before 1900 would cut the total by about a fifth.
- The rule is about the life you lived, but the data is a country-wide share of people over the bar, measured as income in some countries and as spending in others. Spending surveys run lower, so China and India look poorer against the United States than a like-for-like count would show.
- Between 1820 and 1980 the bar's path through the historical income table is a chosen one. Other paths would move the 1850 to 1980 eras.
- Everything before 1820 is informed conjecture. Those eras hold about two fifths of the total on the strength of a reconstructed 1820 income distribution, one estimate of Roman inequality, and PRB's death count, which assumes short lives. The merciful and damning values cover the main choices, but they leave out things the model does not vary, such as the population path.
- The newest income figures are World Bank nowcasts, and deaths after the UN's last estimate are projections. Both are revised each month if the sources change.
- The count covers groups. It names nobody, and it says nothing about any actual person's fate.
Sources and updates
| Feed | Last good fetch | Status |
|---|
| Run | Count at start of year | Change |
|---|