Fun fact, but there's essentially zero correlation between income inequality & wealth inequality- and the Nordics have some of the highest wealth inequality in the world. For example in 2019 by Gini coefficient, the most unequal countries in the world were #1 the Netherlands, #2 Russia, #3 Sweden, and #4 the United States (with Denmark coming in at #8). The data is clearly pretty noisy, but as far as I can see Sweden was again more unequal than the US in 2021:
Meanwhile Southern Europe has reasonably high income inequality, but not much wealth inequality. Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
> many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
A missing piece of the puzzle may be regulatory capture and a strong political/legal structure that resists the worst ambitions of cruel people whether they be wealthy or poor.
You can think of wealth like the potential energy of a spring under tension. If used properly it is capable of powering the most amazing and intricate social mechanisms but if poorly regulated it destroys social fabric and the well being of every day people.
Things like Citizens United and lobbyists representing cruel wealthy interests running unchecked over American democracy are examples of the socially destructive potential energy of wealth.
I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US because they see more opportunity to make money and be cruel in that environment while wealthy people who have some affinity with their nation and the people of it choose to remain and don't or can't lobby for terribly antisocial policies.
People need to start getting specific about their grievances. It’s not inequality per se. People don’t care if some people have more than them. There are specific concrete things.
For Americans the big ones are: a health problem can destroy your life and your life’s savings, housing costs are too high, and college is too expensive and leaves people in debt.
Housing, health care, and tuition.
Two out of three of those are better in Europe, mostly: health care and college costs. They are better even if things are on paper more unequal.
High housing costs are a disease across the entire developed world.
> I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US
That's an interesting thought! It would make sense that the people who care less about others and more about themselves would find it easier and more beneficial to leave. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the wealth, personality traits and political views of the people who leave.
There’s that study that found Italian families who were wealthy during the renaissance are still wealthy.
Sweden had a very powerful monarchy (the dominant Baltic power at one point) and an aristocracy but never a revolution. I’d expect a lot of wealth inequality based on inherited wealth.
A number of articles and at least one well-known study have been published highlighting the fact that the ranks of the wealthiest landowning families in Britain are nearly unchanged since Norman times — e.g. https://www.medievalists.net/2014/11/englands-1-remained-sin...
Sweden's wealth inequality was initiated by Thirty Years' War and The Deluge and then only accumulated not impacted by any violent revolution or brutal invasion.
One thing to note is that the idealized Sweden and many benefits remain because we had a much lower wealth inequality 30 years ago but (mainly) right-wing governments have been very "successful" at removing the barriers that kept the wealth inequality low.
- Inheritance tax was abolished in 2005
- Wealth taxation was abolished in 2007
- "income tax reduction" was initiated in 2007
Meanwhile our schools have gotten larger classes and worse results, especially the income tax reduction was insidious since it was a nationally mandated tax reduction that mainly hits the tax revenue of cities and regions (ie, political entities that had no part in the laws that lowered their tax revenue).
Basically, Sweden has been speed-running into re-making our society into a mini-US and even surpassed the US in some regards.
Sweden 2025 isn't the same as in 1985, and policies enacted around 2005 are the ones that are really starting to hit with their secondary effects today (Iirc Denmark has had fairly many right-wing governments over this period as well).
I did notice once that IKEA's governance scheme looked like an unusually sophisticated anti-tax structure. It now makes sense why the Swedes would be really interested in dodging taxes.
I live in Denmark. I am Danish. Too many people nurse fantasies of the Nordics as some kind of socialist utopia.
The fact is Denmark grows more corrupt by the day. They keep pushing the retirement age so I will be working until I'm 72. Healthcare quality has been dropping for more than 40 years now. The wealthy own the majority of land. We are currently home to a government that is leading the EU in its push for a surveillance mandate that is frankly terrifying in its scope. That same government pushed through the most garbage mega-project I have personally ever witnessed—that we the taxpayers are supposed to fund—despite voter outcry. Digital tenders get sold in backroom deals to a single company that is so ethically bankrupt they've been called out numerous times for workplace violations by our unions.
We're all fucked in the global slide toward authoritarianism and the wealthy's capture of the world economy. And while they get fat supping on our labor we're at each other's throats for who can be crowned the greatest victim.
It's unlikely you will have any retirement except your own savings, as the unfunded pension funds start to collapse globally. Maybe Danish is different but you can check from local sources.
I've been heavily saving for retirement from the day I started working, and approaching FIRE before 40 (living in the Nordics). I've been telling some close friends that even if they don't aim for early retirement, they need to at least have a backup option for regular retirement, but they can't seem to sympathize enough with their 70 year old self who is forced to keep working. And who is going to hire a 70 year old human in 30 years? What economic value could they possibly provide in 2055?
Everyone here needs to make money and save everything they can right now. If you're not saving 50%+ of your income you AGMI
> there's essentially zero correlation between income inequality & wealth inequality
Out of curiosity, how is this measured, and is it due to mega rich people not having taxable incomes? Do you have a source for this? Certainly there must be some correlation between making money have having it…
> Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
Ask someone from the Nordics about housing prices. Do you think they’ll change the subject?
The link you shared has data from 2021, which looks completely different than what you shared - and Sweden comes at 12th, but all the other nordic countries are buried way down in the ranking. It's frankly very hard to believe that the nordic countries are more unequal than America when it comes to income, wealth, well-being or pretty much any statistic you can think of.
There is a asterisk in the table that says that the numbers are a mix between wealth inequality and income inequality. I think it makes it very volatile and hard to interpret.
> Fun fact, but there's essentially zero correlation between income inequality & wealth inequality- and the Nordics have some of the highest wealth inequality in the world.
If there's so little correlation between income inequality and wealth inequality, why are we even supposed to care about wealth inequality? That wealth is essentially frozen in place. It's hopefully being invested in sensible ways, but no one sensible is going to spend it down anytime soon. The thing with wealth is that once you spend it, it's gone for good - so wealth accumulation, especially on any kind of multi-generational scale, tends to be associated with remarkable frugality.
This take seems to take "wealth" in a Disney Scrooge McDuck cartoon way - having "money". That is not what the truly wealthy have though. Their wealth expressed in terms of money is an abstraction. What they really have is control over real assets. I deliberately say "control", because that is what counts, and ownership is not even that important, often many times indirect, sometimes not even that.
The most direct money-equivalent is passive money generating assets like papers with a direct money value, instead of a real world asset. The important stuff is in the real world though, even those papers rely on that.
Owning a money generating real world asset like a successful company is not the same as having some bank account worth half a billion. The disadvantage, the company can go broke. The advantage though is that it generates a stream of money for as long as you manage to keep the business running successfully.
Here is the point where many "let's redistribute wealth" - something I'm certainly not against - fail: How would you redistribute ownership of companies? I don't see a good outcome of handing control over a company from few hands to many hands. They'll turn into manager-led enterprises and will have less entrepreneurship. Everything becomes a public company, and then wealth will re-concentrate into few hands over time anyway, because only few people are really into this kind of thing and thinking.
Instead, there needs to be someway to make it possible for many more people to get reliable incomes, instead of having a lot of control over the economy and the streams of money among few. Getting a bunch of money of assets will not help most people, only for a short time, until those few who love that kind of thing require most assets over time.
The prevailing view among the elites seems to be though that the economy needs most people dependent and mostly broke, to force them into the workplaces of the corporations at - for them - low enough cost (salaries).
The solution can't be though to break up either the firms or even just the ownership. Ownership by committee is unlikely to be successful. The large corps, when they even have a really well-distributed ownership, and not just a few core owners and a large tail of mini-owners with no real power, are not a model that all companies and organizations can or should follow.
Low correlation (if that’s even true) isn’t a reason not to care about wealth inequality, that’s silly. It might be a reason we should focus more on wealth inequality than income inequality, but it’s pretty naive to frame wealth as “frozen” with the only options being spend, save, or invest. The definition of capitalism is that wealth begets more wealth; capital is the fuel and the leverage to claim profits. One might call that “invest”, but that’s misleading and you’ve downplayed it. There’s a broad array of ways for the wealthy to leverage wealth in order to collect more. You can use it to start companies. You can use it to buy other people’s companies. You can borrow against it to get loans for money you can spend without paying taxes. You can influence politics and business in many ways to lean conditions to favor your own investments and thwart others. That’s just to name a few, there are lots more. Having wealth without “spending” it still buys incomes, influence, power, and more wealth.
Given that having wealth earns money and accumulates wealth faster than not having wealth, believing that multi-generational wealth is somehow frugal is pretty funny to me. Sure spending looks “frugal” when your spending is offset by a passive income, when you have so much money you can opulently buy anything you want in the world and it doesn’t even put a dent in your interest income. The mega rich sometimes put their purchases (planes, yachts, mansions) to work earning money. They have a large set of options that they use in practice for enjoying their wealth while paying dramatically lower taxes. Other words that could replace your used of frugal are ‘incentivized’, ‘unfair’, and ‘greedy’. The multi-generational billionaires certainly are not living like paupers nor pinching pennies.
Some confounding factors against comparing income inequality and wealth inequality are that rich people tend to report very low incomes, which is well known and part of the way they get around taxes. For the middle class who is not going to pass on multi-generational wealth, in countries where taxes are high and the social safety net is large, it might make sense to not accumulate. For the middle classes, income is what you care about before you retire, and wealth is what you care about after retiring. If post-retirement living is covered, and if inheritance taxes are high, it might well make the most sense to spend income & share money with family before retiring.
I will generalize but by my experience most Americans I have met just can't fathom to pay (= taxed) for some common good. Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking? Why should I pay for someone's free train ticket when I only travel by car? This I saw across all genders, age groups, and political affiliation. Americans have this hyper individualist mindset that no other country does in the planet. It's good for some things like innovation (see the HN crowd) but not necessarily a benefit for the society.
Americans are literally socially selected for that mindset. Around the world, the vast majority of people don’t want to leave their home countries: https://news.gallup.com/poll/652748/desire-migrate-remains-r.... Even in sub-saharan africa, only 37% would emigrate if they had the choice. In asia it’s single digits. So a large share of America’s population is literally made up of the most antisocial 10-20% of the population that would leave, along with their descendants.
I want to question the assumption here that "pioneer mindset" is an inherited trait, and generally whether we can say anything useful about people living today based on the choices of their ancestors several generations back.
People emigrated from Europe to America because they were out of options. It was not a case of throwing away all of your possessions to go on an adventure. Rather, the vast majority emigrated because it was literally the only way to move up in a world where land ownership was the key to wealth, and your older brother already inherited the farm, or your family did not own any land in the first place. Or perhaps you couldn't even find an apprenticeship.
Keep in mind that all of Europe existed in an extremely rigid social hierarchy with practically zero mobility. Most people in Europe lived in abject poverty. America offered some social mobility, at least to those who came there by choice.
Taxes as various European states and US states are sometimes on par. Everyone pays for somebody’s health problems, Americans as well, through insurance, it is just health insurance is mandatory in Europe. The other stuff boils down to effective use of tax money, it is easier to do it in a smaller state compared to US or Canada or similar. Individualism has an effect but at this day and age it is about lobby groups politicising any topic they do not like. FYI nobody likes to pay taxes.
Americans pay first through taxes, and then again through insurance, so it's even worse. Medicare+Medicaid cost about as much per capita as the UK's NHS, in part because they have intentionally been barred from being as efficient as possible, with e.g. limitations on using their negotiating power.
As for ease of doing it: At least several European systems does delivery via private actors, at least one has decentralised the insurance (Germany), several has segmented the public delivery in regional or local trusts or similar (UK, Norway). In other words: Universal coverage doesn't mean a single top down healthcare system, not is that necessarily desirable. E.g. the UK model uses trusts that prevents failure of leadership in one organisation from causing the whole to fail, and let's trusts get put under alternative management if they underperform.
If anything, the EU is a demonstration of how it is possible to do in a heterogeneous way across a much larger population than the US.
>Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking?
This is a common bad, not a common good. Fundamentally people follow incentives, and when you financially punish good behaviour and reward bad behaviour (make someone with healthy habits pay for someone else's unhealthy habits), you disincentivise the good behaviour and incentivise the bad behaviour. At a society-wide scale, that leads to more of the bad behaviour.
I think the incentive of not getting a life altering or threatening disease is much stronger than having to pay for the treatment yourself. If the cost has any effect on choices, it must be very small because it does not show in statistics.
Trust me, we live this. And it's always someone else's unhealthy habits; I remember a chainsmoking manager expounding at lunch about the awful burden drug users put on the economy.
I lived in Asia and the country had a very capable public healthcare system with universal coverage. Generally a very socially harmonious society that heavily balances personal status with that of society.
But cover the cost of drug for orphan diseases? "Why should my costs go up because of some child that costs half a million a year?"
Also tobacco users cost less in healthcare because they far more often die right around retirement age, never incurring the far more expensive age related healthcare. Being a smoker also disqualifies them from many common procedures, and also the sin taxes smokers pay on tobacco often exceeds their entire lifetime medical costs.
People who blame smokers for healthcare costs are just looking for someone to blame because they either don't want to admit, or don't realize, that their 90 year old granny taking 30 medications a day, having hip replacements, and 3rd round of cancer costs as much in healthcare per year as most people do over 2 or 3 decades.
There are tobacco taxes in the US but it varies by state. Also it seems US is in the lower range on smoking rate compared to many other OECD countries.
Historically these "tax for the common good" policies have only been abused. Most of us are suspicious of/frustrated with them. If you want to improve the common good kill the income tax.
Norway is sitting on a gold mine, I mean, an oil field. It can afford many things other countries can't, while also prudently saving much of its oil income.
If you don’t mind me asking, how were you able to immigrate there? I have family that lives in Norway on my father’s side and I’ve sometimes fantasized about packing up my life and moving there after I visited them and saw what an amazing place it is. The few times I’ve been manic enough to actually consider its realistic plausibility I’ve always been stopped at the dead end of their immigration policy. Maybe things have changed but when I looked into it, it seemed like a very difficult bar to meet (I would’ve either tried to find a skilled trade immigration policy, or perhaps used my extended family as a reason, but neither of those routes seemed particularly possible).
That is a great question and I would be happy to share.
Varnish Software had a job posting in Norway and I asked them if they would consider a US candidate. At that time I was living in the US and was looking for opportunities to immigrate to Norway (or Finland).
After I accepted the position they helped with the “skilled workers visa” process.
Moving abroad has a lot of logistics. Depending on your situation in the US, I suggest to sell, rent, or store your belongings in the US and only bring what you can as luggage on the Airplane. In my case, we had an estate sale, asked family to hang on to sentimental items, and gave away everything else. When we left the US to fly to Norway, we had 5 suitcases of what we needed/wanted.
My partner (at that time) and I had a 6mo old child.
We started with an Airbnb in the Sagene area of Oslo. After landing we rented a car and drove to the Airbnb.
That turned into a 6mo rental (outside of Airbnb) as we explored the area for either an apartment to rent or buy. Again, it helped to have minimal possessions as we moved around to find the area that suited us and our family.
Eventually we settled in an area called Torshov.
June or July is a great time move, the city is calm and almost everyone is on summer holiday.
It can take several months before you are in the banking system to receive your salary, so in advance you will need to have a buffer of savings and to keep a bank account in the US.
Forward all your mail in the US to family, friend, lawyer, or service to keep you informed. Forwarding mail to Norway is possible, but it will be delayed by at least one month, which can be a problem for any bills that are due.
I'd like to point out that any country providing universal healthcare is going to be a big improvement in standard of living for many of my friends. The sometimes hellish nature of the USA's for-profit healthcare system is very real.
Then there's crippling student debt following you nearly to the grave, gun violence, etc.
We grew up being told we had more freedom than anybody else, only to learn as adults that not only does freedom carry a heavy price, but so does every flu and broken bone.
From my experience, living in the US was dystopian compared to what I have experienced in Oslo. I have only been here for 6 years, so given a long enough timeframe that could change.
I think it comes down to mindset. For example You have what you need to live, but the things you want are expensive.
Housing is a problem, but it seems that is a problem almost everywhere. That said, it is not always “easy” to obtain what you want, but I think that is good for society. For example the second hand market is strong.
> A key finding is that a more equal predistribution of earnings, rather than income redistribution, is the main reason for the lower income inequality in the Nordic countries compared to the U.S. and the U.K. While the direct effects of taxes and transfers contribute to the relatively low income inequality in the Nordic countries, the key factor is that the distribution of pre-tax market income, particularly labor earnings, is much more equal in the Nordics than in the U.S. and the U.K.
Yes and this can be good or bad if you work hard and your colleagues do not. I have worked in Norway since 2017. I like it, but I do think that there are other options. Americans like to complain about everything but, at least as far as it goes on hacker news, they have way more options for high salaries than the same workers in Norway do. Of course there are exceptions but having easier access to salaries that are above 100k USD and can grow substantially from 100k USD really changes things. But on the academic side, American PhD students are treated like shit and make shit, whereas Norwegian PhD students get 50-60k salary (totally liveable in Oslo), pension, free healthcare, and likely no teaching requirements, and a lot of academic freedom.
In Norway there also is a strong emphasis on generational wealth being transferred forward. This has made the housing market in Oslo somewhat impenetrable if you didn't have a parent helping you out on your first flat when you are 20.
I'm not saying Norway is bad, I think it's a great place to live if you can accept the winter and that you will never be Norwegian. Also, you should accept that you live in a different culture and should try to figure out how best you can emulate and integrate. This is true for any immigrant situation in my opinion though. It was your choice to move to this country, why show up and think you know better?
I like having a ski mountain right next to the city and I like the university culture as it is more flat like American-style than hierarchical like European-style (I am a research scientist). That being said I lived the last two years in The Netherlands and I think it is better overall in terms of cultural acceptance of outsiders and I think I feel like I understand and, importantly, agree with the ideas of what makes the Dutch the Dutch. Who knows. I don't have all the answers, just my two cents.
> Inequality is never fun for those who believe that they are entitled to more than others.
Inequality is practical for those at the top/those that embody the reality of being entitled to more than others. More people to profit from like e.g. renting out apartments, more unemployed people means higher competition from jobs which can suppress wages, and so on.
The biggest financial problem for most economies these days are retirement obligations towards the growing share of seniors. France and The UK are flirting with the need of being bailed out by the IMF (not possible given the size). Many EU countries have pension obligations their markers are simply not big enough to feed. Similarly in the US the stock market is puny in comparison to the returns expectation of trillions by retirees. The cash held by the wealthy and those who don’t have an overinflated stock market available to them to invest their savings into gets stashed in real estate and that is an even bigger issue. All over the world, passive investment cash is taking over the real estate supply - a needed good is hoarded and supply is choked off.
In proper market economies, that scarcity should lead to more and more construction. Cities should be expanding, right? So to fix the issue, you need regulation that reduces the incentive for real-estate hoarding as an investment vehicle (maybe more serious property taxes on residential real estate that is not a primary home) and you need easier supply of new construction with more government involvement in expanding cities/towns by building infrastructure to support them.
Another issue is healthcare - 90% of your healthcare expenses are incurred the last 10 years of your life. Your two systems of choice are either universal supply of the most basic healthcare (definition of basic expands with the wealth of the country you are in), or privately funded advanced health options for those with life-threatening conditions. The US has the latter, most countries have the former. The biggest problem there is burnout and harder to scale supply of health workers relative to the ever-higher demand. The scary thing here is that governments with high retirement and healthcare debt to their seniors have an increasingly strong incentive to reduce that debt. Pandemics, wars, autocratic silencing of opposition all help with that. In the US where 401k accounts hold the retirements, the stock market will struggle to provide all the returns expected of it. In countries where government provides the pension, the squeeze is on government debt and thus even stronger when yields on that continue to rise (as they do now in Japan).
In the US the 401k is in addition to a relatively generous (by European standards) government pension, it isn’t a replacement or alternative. The same thing exists in many European countries, it just isn’t as strongly encouraged as it is in the US.
The idea that it is important to diversify your retirement income instead of relying on the government or some other single source is one thing American culture gets right. It reduces risk and increases resiliency.
You're going to have a hard time generalising "European" here, because there's a lot of countries and nothing is set (at all AFAIK) at the EU level.
I lived in the UK and Sweden and both countries had massive private pension systems that you pay into ("optionally"). The state pension is a tiny sliver of that.
In fact, in Sweden I can go look at all my private pension funds in one place; here's a picture of that: https://i.imgur.com/rMw6W44.png
You see the tiny red sliver at the bottom: that's my state pension ("Allmän Pension") which is less than 1,850 USD per month before income taxes. That doesn't even include the inflation that will happen between now and 65 (assuming I will be permitted to retire at 65 which seems unlikely).
I dunno: We’re well into the retirement years of the Boomers, and despite whatever drawdown they’re making, the market hasn’t been suffering; just the opposite.
It's because they still print trillions for that. Now it does not cost them much but Printing is not scalable. World has limited resources and limited human capital. At some point European countries will become like Japan, with old native people. But it's not sustaniable in a competitive world economy. In Japan it barely work because they work in older ages and they have very low crime rate and immgration. No developed
country is fully ready for this. They stared to increase retir. age but with not enough jobs that can't help at all. Some EU countries already have crazy debt/GDP ratio.Imagine in a decade? They know what is coming.
Seems plausible wrt my experience, though I've only skimmed it. This is gonna be vague but hopefully interesting.
I feel like there's a traditional job market in Denmark, and then a more recent, foreign-influenced market.
Most people work in the traditional market: there's a collective bargaining agreement, and you just get whatever you get. If they really like you, they find some peanuts within the budget that you can have, but you're not going to negotiate a 40% salary bump compared to similar profiles. You're on a fixed ladder that most of the people doing your title are on. Teachers, doctors, a fair few devs who work in traditional firms. Now and again, it hits the news that some union has demanded a bit more money, and there's some back and forth in the media. But nothing changes about the system, if you work one of these jobs, you are stuck with whatever the outcome of the negotiation is.
Now, Denmark is also a modern country with a lot of highly educated, English speaking people who know what people are doing in other countries.
There's a bunch of power traders in Jutland making a ton of money. There's a bunch of startups of the SV type. There's influencers selling toothpaste and makeup. There's guys trying to build nuclear power. There's private equity and consulting. These guys tend have a different ethos when it comes to salary.
It's more correct to say that the job market is split between unionized labor and high-skilled office positions ("funktionær" = "official"), which is basically anything requiring a university education. In recent decades, the latter category has grown exponentially as industrialized economies have turned into service economies.
Collective bargaining and stepladder salaries are not really a thing for officials, and never has been (outside of a few cases in the public sector, like doctors).
It's worth noting that Norway gets nearly a tenth of its GDP from natural resources, like oil and fish, which is far more than any other country with democratically elected leadership, so how Norway's economy works is very different from how other countries ecenomies work.
Readit News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
Meanwhile Southern Europe has reasonably high income inequality, but not much wealth inequality. Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
https://data.worldhappiness.report/table?_gl=1*13j5g4a*_gcl_...
A missing piece of the puzzle may be regulatory capture and a strong political/legal structure that resists the worst ambitions of cruel people whether they be wealthy or poor.
You can think of wealth like the potential energy of a spring under tension. If used properly it is capable of powering the most amazing and intricate social mechanisms but if poorly regulated it destroys social fabric and the well being of every day people.
Things like Citizens United and lobbyists representing cruel wealthy interests running unchecked over American democracy are examples of the socially destructive potential energy of wealth.
I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US because they see more opportunity to make money and be cruel in that environment while wealthy people who have some affinity with their nation and the people of it choose to remain and don't or can't lobby for terribly antisocial policies.
For Americans the big ones are: a health problem can destroy your life and your life’s savings, housing costs are too high, and college is too expensive and leaves people in debt.
Housing, health care, and tuition.
Two out of three of those are better in Europe, mostly: health care and college costs. They are better even if things are on paper more unequal.
High housing costs are a disease across the entire developed world.
That's an interesting thought! It would make sense that the people who care less about others and more about themselves would find it easier and more beneficial to leave. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the wealth, personality traits and political views of the people who leave.
Nordic countries have high VAT but that's hardly going to hurt you.. On the other hand Sweden has less property tax than the US.
I guess if you consume services then that will be more expensive in the Nordics, since tax on salaries is high.
Sweden had a very powerful monarchy (the dominant Baltic power at one point) and an aristocracy but never a revolution. I’d expect a lot of wealth inequality based on inherited wealth.
- Inheritance tax was abolished in 2005 - Wealth taxation was abolished in 2007 - "income tax reduction" was initiated in 2007
Meanwhile our schools have gotten larger classes and worse results, especially the income tax reduction was insidious since it was a nationally mandated tax reduction that mainly hits the tax revenue of cities and regions (ie, political entities that had no part in the laws that lowered their tax revenue).
Basically, Sweden has been speed-running into re-making our society into a mini-US and even surpassed the US in some regards.
Sweden 2025 isn't the same as in 1985, and policies enacted around 2005 are the ones that are really starting to hit with their secondary effects today (Iirc Denmark has had fairly many right-wing governments over this period as well).
I did notice once that IKEA's governance scheme looked like an unusually sophisticated anti-tax structure. It now makes sense why the Swedes would be really interested in dodging taxes.
I live in Denmark. I am Danish. Too many people nurse fantasies of the Nordics as some kind of socialist utopia.
The fact is Denmark grows more corrupt by the day. They keep pushing the retirement age so I will be working until I'm 72. Healthcare quality has been dropping for more than 40 years now. The wealthy own the majority of land. We are currently home to a government that is leading the EU in its push for a surveillance mandate that is frankly terrifying in its scope. That same government pushed through the most garbage mega-project I have personally ever witnessed—that we the taxpayers are supposed to fund—despite voter outcry. Digital tenders get sold in backroom deals to a single company that is so ethically bankrupt they've been called out numerous times for workplace violations by our unions.
We're all fucked in the global slide toward authoritarianism and the wealthy's capture of the world economy. And while they get fat supping on our labor we're at each other's throats for who can be crowned the greatest victim.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_crisis
Everyone here needs to make money and save everything they can right now. If you're not saving 50%+ of your income you AGMI
Which project was that?
Yes pretty much, and hello form Norway.
Out of curiosity, how is this measured, and is it due to mega rich people not having taxable incomes? Do you have a source for this? Certainly there must be some correlation between making money have having it…
Ask someone from the Nordics about housing prices. Do you think they’ll change the subject?
If there's so little correlation between income inequality and wealth inequality, why are we even supposed to care about wealth inequality? That wealth is essentially frozen in place. It's hopefully being invested in sensible ways, but no one sensible is going to spend it down anytime soon. The thing with wealth is that once you spend it, it's gone for good - so wealth accumulation, especially on any kind of multi-generational scale, tends to be associated with remarkable frugality.
The most direct money-equivalent is passive money generating assets like papers with a direct money value, instead of a real world asset. The important stuff is in the real world though, even those papers rely on that.
Owning a money generating real world asset like a successful company is not the same as having some bank account worth half a billion. The disadvantage, the company can go broke. The advantage though is that it generates a stream of money for as long as you manage to keep the business running successfully.
Here is the point where many "let's redistribute wealth" - something I'm certainly not against - fail: How would you redistribute ownership of companies? I don't see a good outcome of handing control over a company from few hands to many hands. They'll turn into manager-led enterprises and will have less entrepreneurship. Everything becomes a public company, and then wealth will re-concentrate into few hands over time anyway, because only few people are really into this kind of thing and thinking.
Instead, there needs to be someway to make it possible for many more people to get reliable incomes, instead of having a lot of control over the economy and the streams of money among few. Getting a bunch of money of assets will not help most people, only for a short time, until those few who love that kind of thing require most assets over time.
The prevailing view among the elites seems to be though that the economy needs most people dependent and mostly broke, to force them into the workplaces of the corporations at - for them - low enough cost (salaries).
The solution can't be though to break up either the firms or even just the ownership. Ownership by committee is unlikely to be successful. The large corps, when they even have a really well-distributed ownership, and not just a few core owners and a large tail of mini-owners with no real power, are not a model that all companies and organizations can or should follow.
Given that having wealth earns money and accumulates wealth faster than not having wealth, believing that multi-generational wealth is somehow frugal is pretty funny to me. Sure spending looks “frugal” when your spending is offset by a passive income, when you have so much money you can opulently buy anything you want in the world and it doesn’t even put a dent in your interest income. The mega rich sometimes put their purchases (planes, yachts, mansions) to work earning money. They have a large set of options that they use in practice for enjoying their wealth while paying dramatically lower taxes. Other words that could replace your used of frugal are ‘incentivized’, ‘unfair’, and ‘greedy’. The multi-generational billionaires certainly are not living like paupers nor pinching pennies.
Some confounding factors against comparing income inequality and wealth inequality are that rich people tend to report very low incomes, which is well known and part of the way they get around taxes. For the middle class who is not going to pass on multi-generational wealth, in countries where taxes are high and the social safety net is large, it might make sense to not accumulate. For the middle classes, income is what you care about before you retire, and wealth is what you care about after retiring. If post-retirement living is covered, and if inheritance taxes are high, it might well make the most sense to spend income & share money with family before retiring.
Precisely, it's a nonsense metric that doesn't anything about poverty at all which is something that truly matters.
People emigrated from Europe to America because they were out of options. It was not a case of throwing away all of your possessions to go on an adventure. Rather, the vast majority emigrated because it was literally the only way to move up in a world where land ownership was the key to wealth, and your older brother already inherited the farm, or your family did not own any land in the first place. Or perhaps you couldn't even find an apprenticeship.
Keep in mind that all of Europe existed in an extremely rigid social hierarchy with practically zero mobility. Most people in Europe lived in abject poverty. America offered some social mobility, at least to those who came there by choice.
As for ease of doing it: At least several European systems does delivery via private actors, at least one has decentralised the insurance (Germany), several has segmented the public delivery in regional or local trusts or similar (UK, Norway). In other words: Universal coverage doesn't mean a single top down healthcare system, not is that necessarily desirable. E.g. the UK model uses trusts that prevents failure of leadership in one organisation from causing the whole to fail, and let's trusts get put under alternative management if they underperform.
If anything, the EU is a demonstration of how it is possible to do in a heterogeneous way across a much larger population than the US.
But I guess it works both ways?
This is a common bad, not a common good. Fundamentally people follow incentives, and when you financially punish good behaviour and reward bad behaviour (make someone with healthy habits pay for someone else's unhealthy habits), you disincentivise the good behaviour and incentivise the bad behaviour. At a society-wide scale, that leads to more of the bad behaviour.
I lived in Asia and the country had a very capable public healthcare system with universal coverage. Generally a very socially harmonious society that heavily balances personal status with that of society.
But cover the cost of drug for orphan diseases? "Why should my costs go up because of some child that costs half a million a year?"
It was quite shocking.
Come to Poland. This kind of egoism becomes more and more rampant.
In the EU (I have no idea about America) tobacco is heavily (and I mean heavily in some countries) taxed because of this.
People who blame smokers for healthcare costs are just looking for someone to blame because they either don't want to admit, or don't realize, that their 90 year old granny taking 30 medications a day, having hip replacements, and 3rd round of cancer costs as much in healthcare per year as most people do over 2 or 3 decades.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
You can’t really compare dollar to krone the difference of a US salary to a Norwegian salary.
I’m not sure how to explain it for those who haven’t lived in the nordics, but you don't need a high paying income to live a good life.
Varnish Software had a job posting in Norway and I asked them if they would consider a US candidate. At that time I was living in the US and was looking for opportunities to immigrate to Norway (or Finland).
After I accepted the position they helped with the “skilled workers visa” process.
Moving abroad has a lot of logistics. Depending on your situation in the US, I suggest to sell, rent, or store your belongings in the US and only bring what you can as luggage on the Airplane. In my case, we had an estate sale, asked family to hang on to sentimental items, and gave away everything else. When we left the US to fly to Norway, we had 5 suitcases of what we needed/wanted.
My partner (at that time) and I had a 6mo old child.
We started with an Airbnb in the Sagene area of Oslo. After landing we rented a car and drove to the Airbnb.
That turned into a 6mo rental (outside of Airbnb) as we explored the area for either an apartment to rent or buy. Again, it helped to have minimal possessions as we moved around to find the area that suited us and our family. Eventually we settled in an area called Torshov.
June or July is a great time move, the city is calm and almost everyone is on summer holiday.
It can take several months before you are in the banking system to receive your salary, so in advance you will need to have a buffer of savings and to keep a bank account in the US.
Forward all your mail in the US to family, friend, lawyer, or service to keep you informed. Forwarding mail to Norway is possible, but it will be delayed by at least one month, which can be a problem for any bills that are due.
I'd like to point out that any country providing universal healthcare is going to be a big improvement in standard of living for many of my friends. The sometimes hellish nature of the USA's for-profit healthcare system is very real.
Then there's crippling student debt following you nearly to the grave, gun violence, etc.
We grew up being told we had more freedom than anybody else, only to learn as adults that not only does freedom carry a heavy price, but so does every flu and broken bone.
I think it comes down to mindset. For example You have what you need to live, but the things you want are expensive.
Housing is a problem, but it seems that is a problem almost everywhere. That said, it is not always “easy” to obtain what you want, but I think that is good for society. For example the second hand market is strong.
I’m not sure if that answers your question.
> A key finding is that a more equal predistribution of earnings, rather than income redistribution, is the main reason for the lower income inequality in the Nordic countries compared to the U.S. and the U.K. While the direct effects of taxes and transfers contribute to the relatively low income inequality in the Nordic countries, the key factor is that the distribution of pre-tax market income, particularly labor earnings, is much more equal in the Nordics than in the U.S. and the U.K.
Yes and this can be good or bad if you work hard and your colleagues do not. I have worked in Norway since 2017. I like it, but I do think that there are other options. Americans like to complain about everything but, at least as far as it goes on hacker news, they have way more options for high salaries than the same workers in Norway do. Of course there are exceptions but having easier access to salaries that are above 100k USD and can grow substantially from 100k USD really changes things. But on the academic side, American PhD students are treated like shit and make shit, whereas Norwegian PhD students get 50-60k salary (totally liveable in Oslo), pension, free healthcare, and likely no teaching requirements, and a lot of academic freedom.
In Norway there also is a strong emphasis on generational wealth being transferred forward. This has made the housing market in Oslo somewhat impenetrable if you didn't have a parent helping you out on your first flat when you are 20.
I'm not saying Norway is bad, I think it's a great place to live if you can accept the winter and that you will never be Norwegian. Also, you should accept that you live in a different culture and should try to figure out how best you can emulate and integrate. This is true for any immigrant situation in my opinion though. It was your choice to move to this country, why show up and think you know better?
I like having a ski mountain right next to the city and I like the university culture as it is more flat like American-style than hierarchical like European-style (I am a research scientist). That being said I lived the last two years in The Netherlands and I think it is better overall in terms of cultural acceptance of outsiders and I think I feel like I understand and, importantly, agree with the ideas of what makes the Dutch the Dutch. Who knows. I don't have all the answers, just my two cents.
Regardless - impenetrable housing markets are not a consequence of equality, so you are kind of self contradicting.
Inequality is practical for those at the top/those that embody the reality of being entitled to more than others. More people to profit from like e.g. renting out apartments, more unemployed people means higher competition from jobs which can suppress wages, and so on.
We can all make quips.
Do you believe people who work harder or do things that others are unwilling/unable to do are not entitled to more than others?
In proper market economies, that scarcity should lead to more and more construction. Cities should be expanding, right? So to fix the issue, you need regulation that reduces the incentive for real-estate hoarding as an investment vehicle (maybe more serious property taxes on residential real estate that is not a primary home) and you need easier supply of new construction with more government involvement in expanding cities/towns by building infrastructure to support them.
Another issue is healthcare - 90% of your healthcare expenses are incurred the last 10 years of your life. Your two systems of choice are either universal supply of the most basic healthcare (definition of basic expands with the wealth of the country you are in), or privately funded advanced health options for those with life-threatening conditions. The US has the latter, most countries have the former. The biggest problem there is burnout and harder to scale supply of health workers relative to the ever-higher demand. The scary thing here is that governments with high retirement and healthcare debt to their seniors have an increasingly strong incentive to reduce that debt. Pandemics, wars, autocratic silencing of opposition all help with that. In the US where 401k accounts hold the retirements, the stock market will struggle to provide all the returns expected of it. In countries where government provides the pension, the squeeze is on government debt and thus even stronger when yields on that continue to rise (as they do now in Japan).
The idea that it is important to diversify your retirement income instead of relying on the government or some other single source is one thing American culture gets right. It reduces risk and increases resiliency.
I lived in the UK and Sweden and both countries had massive private pension systems that you pay into ("optionally"). The state pension is a tiny sliver of that.
In fact, in Sweden I can go look at all my private pension funds in one place; here's a picture of that: https://i.imgur.com/rMw6W44.png
You see the tiny red sliver at the bottom: that's my state pension ("Allmän Pension") which is less than 1,850 USD per month before income taxes. That doesn't even include the inflation that will happen between now and 65 (assuming I will be permitted to retire at 65 which seems unlikely).
I feel like there's a traditional job market in Denmark, and then a more recent, foreign-influenced market.
Most people work in the traditional market: there's a collective bargaining agreement, and you just get whatever you get. If they really like you, they find some peanuts within the budget that you can have, but you're not going to negotiate a 40% salary bump compared to similar profiles. You're on a fixed ladder that most of the people doing your title are on. Teachers, doctors, a fair few devs who work in traditional firms. Now and again, it hits the news that some union has demanded a bit more money, and there's some back and forth in the media. But nothing changes about the system, if you work one of these jobs, you are stuck with whatever the outcome of the negotiation is.
Now, Denmark is also a modern country with a lot of highly educated, English speaking people who know what people are doing in other countries.
There's a bunch of power traders in Jutland making a ton of money. There's a bunch of startups of the SV type. There's influencers selling toothpaste and makeup. There's guys trying to build nuclear power. There's private equity and consulting. These guys tend have a different ethos when it comes to salary.
Collective bargaining and stepladder salaries are not really a thing for officials, and never has been (outside of a few cases in the public sector, like doctors).
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33444