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
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.
The Deluge didn't cause wealth inequality in Sweden. Some military leaders were, during Swedish wars, rewarded with increased land holdings, but these were later reduced. Sweden's wealth was also created late. Sweden was a poor country until the early 1900eds.
>How do you even "consume" wealth, assuming the wealth is more significant than a few millions in the bank.
"A few millions in the bank" for hundreds of thousands or million of people would already make a nordic country the king of lesser inequality - unless (as the parent says, don't know it's true) it's tied up in company assets (and perhaps they use them as company perks even in one-person companies, to avoid the tax, thus masking better equality at the individual level).
I suppose the person means that you have to pay about 50% in taxes to take out the capital/profit from the company before you can use it as a private person.
This type of comparison needs to add corporate income tax (20%) in order to be an apples to apples comparison,so 27.5. It's still a stark difference in taxation, and I know of no other country that does what Finland does for dividend taxation. In fact for earned income,things look even uglier when you add in tax-like social security contributions.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Finnish companies are also an outlier in paying extremely high dividends.
In Norway it's 37.8%. Though you do get "skjermingsrente" (about the same rate as the central bank rate) on the amount you originally invested (ie.: not on any untaxed gains you've had).
Doesn't mean it isn't done. The Lego family was caught flying their private jet all over the world so they sold it and now have exclusive renting rights to a plane in a hangar operated by another company.
There is a strict separation between business and personal consumption.
If the Lego family uses business jets to go on vacation, then they need to 1) pay market rate for using the jets and 2) pay full income taxes, VAT etc.
Anyhow, when you are rich enough this tripling in cost does not really matter - but it does reflect in the income equality statistics.
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 think it will be ok due to two factors. One even if funds go bust care of old people is basically done by young people chipping in and helping and that can go on. Two, regarding aging populations, against that we'll have AI and robots doing stuff before most people retire.
>One even if funds go bust care of old people is basically done by young people chipping in and helping and that can go on.
If you mean "young people" in general, the fertility rate ensures they'll be less and less, and thus a heavier and heavier burdern to chip in for older people.
If you mean young people that are family, an increased (over 30%) number of old people won't have children or will have estranged children, and no help.
As for "AI and robots" don't bet on those either. It takes people to maintain an economy and an infrastructure that makes and deploys robots at any significant scale, and those will be scarce, and the demographic hit will make both productivity and consumption contract too. Societies increasingly can't even fix potholes and basic public services.
You don't have to extrapolate that much improvement for them to start having an impact and I imagine factories in China will churn them out like they do most other tech.
Whether or not there are enough young people does not matter.
The plan was to have fully funded pensions, bootstrapping them after the start. You cannot have infinite growth any case, as eventually we run out of space and resources. It must come to end at some decade.
However funding pensions full was never executed. It was too easy for politicians not to pass taxes, social benefit costs and such to do this, because boomers would have complained decades ago when they were still in the fullest earning potential.
So it does matter. Contracting economy, aging population, worse social dynamisc, political and institutional inertia, productivity drops, etc. Robots aren't going to offset but a tiny part of this.
And between payroll taxes and the fact that stocks, 401ks, etc depend on economic growth, things will turn real shitty...
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
I can tell from Germany, maybe some will hire, because unless they can replace workers with robots, like it is happening in some supermarkets, they will get whatever they can.
It doesn't come up often, but I have seen a decent amount of 70+ people doing what they can, as cashiers, kiosks, hospitals, doctor offices, bus drivers,...or in general any job where youth isn't into applying for learning on the job, or even so where demand isn't getting fulfilled.
>I can tell from Germany, maybe some will hire, because unless they can replace workers with robots, like it is happening in some supermarkets, they will get whatever they can.
What's more likely going forward is that they'll downscale their operations in a contracting economy, than hire 70 years olds or needing robots for the same jobs. And if it needs be, they'll get immigrants for most jobs.
> I can tell from Germany, maybe some will hire, because unless they can replace workers with robots, like it is happening in some supermarkets, they will get whatever they can.
No, they will do what they have done in the last 20 years which is import people from the middle-east or northern Africa to do the jobs and pay them the lowest wage possible.
My wife works in healthcare in Sweden and more than 50% of the people who work on the hospital wards/in age care these days are either newly arrived migrants or descendants of recent migrants.
Unfortunately most of these people are under-qualified, barely speak Swedish but they are cheap.
That puts a lot of pressure to keep the wages of everyone down because they keep bringing more and more people from abroad. This isn't even a fix because as soon as they get their permanent residencies or citizenship (for the ones who do not have it), these people move on to something else because the jobs are just awful with long hours on your feet and being treated like a servant by the patients/residents.
Unfortunately that is why many European countries are going back to a reality I thought it was gone, back when I was a kid, being the first generation being born after carnation revolution.
This is not going to work forever. Eventually conditions can get bad enough that upper middle class MENA people won't prefer a lower class European position.
I said a good overview. Many experts have given their analysis on why Lynetteholmen sucks including environmental scientists [1]. The very fact that the environmental assessments were done piecemeal [2] plainly demonstrates the politicians responsible for this mega-project disaster knew exactly how bad it was.
Supporting Ukraine against Moscovite aggression is important for all of Europe. Otherwise next they will come for other countries in Europe, as proven by them many times before.
This is extremely little money compare to the alternative.
Irish person here. We feel it is important to support the international rule of law. Big countries should not be allowed to invade and take their smaller neighbours. Due to our history we are very sensitive to imperialism.
But you should be aware that russian foreign policy is not decided in the television. TV propaganda serves internal purposes. And there is a policy and strategy on Kremlin, not just crazy evil Putin trying to destroy the world of Good.
Contrary to hysteric media narrative, decision makers in Kremlin are not mad, crazy or whatever, and believing this brings more harm than good. Russia isn't strong enough to seriously threaten Western Europe, and they are aware of it. Moreover, they have not much to gain by trying to conquer Lisbon versus monstrous costs they would need to bear, even if we ignore the fact they wouldn't be able to not only reach Lisbon, but Berlin as well. Europe is no longer a center of the world, regardless if we like it or not.
That doesn't mean Russia cannot harm interests of countries of Western Europe, carry out sabotage acts, sow and fuel internal strife etc. They can, and they do. But it is not an existential threat.
Whats the endgame of the "Russia isn't quite as bad/powerful/ambitious as you think, just let them take Ukraine" posture though?
Where do the Baltics and Poland stand in such a scenario? And in 5-20 years when they've encroached there, what of Germany? Do we let them just slowly digest Eastern Europe all over again?
Eh, I always forget it is kinda pointless to discuss politics here.
Never stated that they should just take Ukraine, or they are not "as bad". And please spare me lectures about lingering doom of the Easter Europe - I live in Poland, 20 km from the Ukrainian border. I am aware of stakes, especially considering idiocy of my government.
What I objected to is a proposition that "Europe" is some political monolith, and all countries here are equally threatened by Russia. Some European countries are under serious threat (mine among them), others are less threatened, and some are not threatened in any serious manner.
Lack of understanding this causes people to be constantly surprised that things look as they look.
I am more surprised by the reaction of Hungary than Portugal's reaction. They gave even been invaded by Soviets.
The other commenter from Ireland had a good point about rule based world order. And Ukraine has received a lot of help in particular from Canada but also from Australia.
But not enough to actually help them win the war, and why? Because stakes are not high enough for Canada or Australia. The same is true for countries I listed before. Poland for example is different - stakes are very high, but we are governed by morons and worms.
Obviously many countries see it beneficial to prevent Russia from reaching its goals, because that's how international politics work, especially when everything became global, but it doesn't mean they are threatened by it or they would be invaded if Ukraine falls.
The hope that punishing Russia for breaking rules would in any way prevent others from trying the same in the future is naive. For rules to be respected in a particular moment of history, there has to be a force that is able to effectively enforce those rules in that particular moment of history. Without it any punishment that happened in past will not matter.
As for Hungary - Orban is very good player. inb4 no, I wouldn't like to live in Hungary, but that doesn't prevent me from appreciating political skill.
I actually don't understand what you are trying to say in any of your posts. There are lots of words, nitpicks about saying "all of Europe" when some countries are less affected than others, "I am from Poland" "out government are morons" without saying how. "Canada themselves does not give Ukraine enough to win the war" "Orban is a good player".
You are saying lots of things but there is no coherency, no strategy, no alternatives.
> 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…
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> It’s not inequality per se. People don’t care if some people have more than them.
Actually it is. Inequality has been correlated with high crime, lower life expectancy and lower health (even for the rich subsection of the population, compared to a more equal country). In your example, high housing cost entrenches inequality and gives generational wealth a leg up.
Trying to make a country good but inequal is like trying to push water uphill.
High housing costs are a disease of major cities in the developing world; there's plenty of places where housing is quite affordable. Yes, many of these places are at least semi-rural, but this no longer much of a limitation, seeing as high-bandwidth Internet is now available literally anywhere on the planet.
We didn't have any meaningful primaries in the last presidential election. The elites picked their candidates for a token vote by the people. Third parties are actively suppressed by those same elites.
Smaller state and local elections are better, but that's not where the power or money goes.
Getting specific allows people to go after their specific problems with pragmatic solutions.
The top poster was highlighting the fact that there are societies that are just as unequal (or worse) but better on many of these fronts. That doesn’t mean inequality is good. It means that it’s not a single underlying cause, and it’s not that simple.
Refusing to get specific leads to hand wavey populist demagoguery. In this case it leads to a broad unfocused crusade against “elites” and “the rich” that history shows often morphs into fascism (lots of Bernie voters went MAGA) or results in policies that land broadly on the middle and upper middle class and often spare the truly rich. Usually the result is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, since it’s easy to be a demagogue and pound the table about vague “underlying causes” without doing anything but virtue signaling and dog whistling to the base. No specifics means no KPIs for politicians, nothing to hold them accountable.
If you elect someone on a platform of making housing, health care, and tuition affordable and those things don’t become affordable, it’s hard to weasel out of that with posturing and bullshit.
>history shows often morphs into fascism (lots of Bernie voters went MAGA)
This is FUD that is very specifically DNC coded. The extremely plutocratic DNC-linked propaganda outlets that fed this absolute nonsense peddled all sorts of other nonsense conspiracy theories too (e.g. Russiagate, not that that one did them any good...).
Every single one of the DNC supporters implicitly backed fascism and Nazi-style genocide in Gaza by lending their support to the same DNC that backed it (even if they did not agree with it).
Again, plutocracy at work.
They paved the way for the equally depraved MAGA fascism that supplanted them. Trying to pin it instead on a bunch of powerless progressives, some of whom voted for "not more of the same shit" plumbs the very deepest wells of moral depravity. It is deeply shameful.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
Control is fungible to a large extent. If a company is badly run, someone can launch a takeover bid and get that control for themselves. All that matters is that they're generally expected to do better at running the company, so that it's more likely to generate money in the long run and less likely to do broke.
It also matters that they have access to the money to do the takeover. That can happen in many ways but generally requires they have at least a few percent of it themselves, which for most companies and most people is way out of reach.
(Also with a privately owned company there's not really any means to do this in a hostile manner)
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.
> ...You can borrow against it to get loans for money you can spend without paying taxes. ...
Are you assuming that loans don't need to be paid back at some point? What you're listing is ways of either investing wealth (that is, using it productively to make more wealth - which is far from easy or free of risk) or spending it down. Some ways of spending wealth down may be tax-advantaged in some locales, but this is offset by the fact that taxing income places an extra tax burden on the time-based and precautionary value of that same accumulated wealth. I.e. wealth that's being invested in a risky, long-term venture is in fact quite heavily taxed.
The rough tax avoidance strategy here is to take out loans with your assets as collateral, and keep rolling those loans forward until you die, at which point they can be paid off and then onto your heirs with relatively little tax. This doesn't give you access to all of your wealth as cash (since the collateral is risky so you need to put up some amount more than you're borrowing), but what you do get you get without paying anywhere near as much tax, the interest on such loans is very low, and you still keep control of whatever asset you're borrowing against and whatever gains/income it might produce.
> Are you assuming that loans don’t need to be paid back at some point?
No, what I said is you don’t have to pay taxes on those loans. Obviously a loan is paid back. The tax avoidance scheme here is that a loan is not income and you can use held stock (that hasn’t been taxed) as collateral for short term loans.
> this is offset by the fact that taxing income places an extra tax burden on the time-based and precautionary value of that same accumulated wealth.
Not sure what you’re referring to. Again, the mega rich often don’t have significant “incomes” from a taxation point of view, regardless of how much money they make or spend.
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.
Yes, thank you. A huge percentage of historical European immigration to the US was by groups that functionally had zero wealth or social mobility in their home countries. Working in a steel mill in the new world was hell, but it beat generational rural poverty back home.
The hyper-individualism of modern America is something that has developed fairly recently, even if it had earlier roots.
You cannot read the Founding Fathers without noticing that Americans were quite individualistic (and mistrustful of governmental power) from the start of the country. Till about 1910, there was no Federal income tax because it was believed by most Americans that it would be unconstitutional (i.e., an illegal encroachment of the individual's right to keep all the money he or she earns). Ditto any Federal ban on heroin or cocaine, both big social problems.
Individualism in the contemporary sense is not the same thing as skepticism of governmental power circa 1780.
Income taxes as a concept weren't really adopted, globally, until the mid-1800s through the early 1900s. So I don't think skepticism of them is inherently an American individualist thing.
> The hyper-individualism of modern America is something that has developed fairly recently, even if it had earlier roots.
America circa 1950 or 1900 had much stronger social bonds in local communities, families, etc. The current hyper-individualism is more a consequence of the last third of the 20th century, not anything inherently American.
Of course, one might make the argument that this was some kind of inevitable outcome due to a seed in the American psyche, but I don't really buy that argument.
The 1960s was when the US got welfare and SSI (disability insurance for people who haven't already paid into the Social Security system).
Being able to rely on these governmental benefits might have made families less reliant on the local community, churches and extended family, which in turn might have caused daily life to feel more alienating or atomized.
I bring this up because welfare and SSI can be viewed as a move towards collectivism and away from individualism, so arguing about how individualistic the US has been over time is kind of a sterile game because the answer is highly dependent on the exact definition of individualism.
On top of that, there’s social transmission of values within families. Much of the country descends from 20th century immigrants, where the effect of the immigrant generation is still prominent. Much of the rest of the country descends from people who left their civilized east coast and settled the frontier.
> 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
This isn’t any different in much of asia or africa today. Most people are content with their place in the world without abandoning all their kinship ties to “move up.”
A good portion emigrated because it was either that or the gallows. Another portion - possibly those that you referred to with the 'by choice' bit was imported as so much cattle to be used and abused. Slavery powered a lot of engines in those days and even if those European ancestors washed their hands of it in Europe at the time their descendants had no problem at all setting it up in what would become the USA as well as they folks 'back home' profiting immensely from it. Here in NL they are still to a large extent in denial about it. And that spirit is also still alive and well in the USA.
The group that descends from enslaved people brought here involuntarily also has by far the highest levels of group identity and support for redistributive policies. So that supports my point.
Hey man, everything supports your point so I don't think I'm surprised by that.
ICE deportations without due process: check -> supports Rayiner's point
Massive and ongoing violations of the US constitution: check -> supports Rayiner's point
Immigrants and their descendants voting against immigration: check -> supports Rayiner's point
Troops deployed to cities that were doing no worse than other cities but happened to be run by democrats: check -> supports Rayiner's point
Taking a sledgehammer to the federal government without any consideration for the consequences: check -> supports Rayiner's point
I wonder at what moment - if ever - you will look around and say 'Hey, you know what, I'm co-responsible for this mess and I own up to it'. I don't know if you have a daughter or not but if not we'll substitute some other female relative. Let's imagine for the moment that you do and you get the choice of leaving her in a room for a couple of days with Trump, Biden or Harris which would you pick? And if not Trump, why not, after all, what's there to fear, he's an upstanding citizens that any self respecting lawyer would vote for. There are plenty of MAGA's who are just too stupid to know better after a couple of decades on FOX and AM talk radio, so they get a pass, in spite of all the damage that they do.
But guys that clerked for the US court of appeals are held to a higher standard.
There is this proverb: a country gets the government that it deserves. Now, I have a crap government here at the moment, but at least I'm not responsible for voting it in and cheering it on while they do their crap and I still feel responsible just by being from here and the fact that they - unfortunately - represent me too.
> you get the choice of leaving her in a room for a couple of days with Trump, Biden or Harris which would you pick?
I don’t know how this is relevant to what we were discussing, but yes, I have a daughter. And one of my principal fears was how much social pressure she would feel to relate to Harris, a shallow mediocrity who might have been greater if everyone didn’t have the lowest possible expectations for her on account of identity politics.
And so you voted for the greedy, utterly corrupt criminal instead. I really wonder how you could come to this utterly bizarre conclusion. Trump isn't an example for anybody, least of all your kids, and god forbid they'd look at a woman that made it to president and think that that might be something to aspire to. Incredible.
EDIT: I wrote a bunch of stuff, but realized Glenn Loury said it a thousand times better: https://x.com/nashvilletea/status/1961683711511969904?s=46. Watch to the very end: “You will not be equal at the end of that argument, even if you get what you ask for.” I almost felt bad for Harris after the election. It became obvious how few people actually respected her as a leader. They installed her as a generic “woman of color” because it made them feel good and like they were achieving a milestone in the “arc of history.” It’s pitiable, not admirable.
I raise my kids the way my dad raised me—and how white elites raise their own kids, in contrast to how they see brown kids: to always have an internal locus of control, never make excuses, and never demand society’s protection or accommodation.
Europe and particularly the UK is still extremely rigid, and I fear to until the bitter end. You have a government right now riddled with aristocrats ignoring the electorate. I fear for my family living in Manchester and London.
Hard to say. Americas have been far less dense in population than the old world, and colonizers brought old world tech with which they immediately could start to make use of the land, so they face far less scarcity. For any group of people this is hugely beneficial to their development and helpful in solving their conflicts. Yet we still see some of world's the worst slavey and genocides there. Also today's Latin American isn't world famous for high living standards.
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.
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.
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?"
>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.
Sure, but making people pay for those treatments themselves does not change anything. For many the quick satisfaction of good food is simply a stronger incentive than a healthy body or a fatter wallet 10 years later.
I highly doubt the people overeating are picking up the fork, then considering "oh, I'll be really unhealthy when I'm older, but at least I won't be out any money for it" before they take their bite. Much like harsher punishments for crimes, this kind of thinking doesn't work because it's just not something people factor into their behaviour anywhere near as much as you would think.
1) Excess calorie consumption has only been true since about 1990. Up until that point, average heights were still increasing, so that meant that a significant chunk of the population were still undernourished. We are only about one generation from that mark, so people's social habits still haven't moved on from scarcity.
2) Nicotine, in particular, is quite good for appetite suppression. Unfortunately, the delivery system most people choose (smoking) causes more problems that the obesity it suppresses.
3) How easily people lose weight on GLP-1 agonists shows that obesity isn't just lack of willpower. The human body has a lot of systems encouraging you to hoard calories metabolically and very few systems telling you to stop. It is quite impressive that a single drug can somehow flip those metabolic systems completely in the other direction.
> 3) How easily people lose weight on GLP-1 agonists shows that obesity isn't just lack of willpower
What? I’m about as pro-GLP1 as it gets - see past comments on the subject.
But if anything it absolutely slams the door shut on obesity about being anything but overeating when the environment made it so damn easy to do so. The method of action is you are less hungry and eat less. Full stop. Secondary effects are a rounding error.
Sure, there are societal reasons people are fat now. I don’t actually believe willpower is a real thing when surrounded by unhealthy addictive choices. But being able to turn off the hunger switch and turn to easy mode is absolutely the reason these drugs work and are life changing.
I’m not ashamed to admit my being fat was due to lack of willpower to not eat excessively. Having a way to make it so I didn’t need to engage said willpower even half as much was the reason I’m now down to 12% body fat and am in shape from working out heavily. It’s not like you take the drug and you magically get thin - you still need to work at it and make healthy choices. They simply become easier to do.
Pretending it’s otherwise for the vast majority of people is a disservice.
The best most honest way I’ve come up with to describe these drugs is a performance enhancing drug for your diet.
Changing society at a root cause level would of course be far better, but that’s not realistic on any human lifetime sort of scale. This is the best we have for people alive today.
One of the things that blew my mind when I moved to the US from Europe were the enormous portions and the amount of grease in every single dish when eating out. Even simple salads were shiny and drenched in oil. It only takes a small percentage of excessive calories over long periods to explain the obesity epidemic.
I agree with your comment, except that framing it as "lack of willpower" is unfortunate, because it implies that you should somehow be able to ignore these signals - if only you had enough "willpower". It seems to require an untenable amount of willpower to sustain a resistance to these signals, so perhaps it isn't realistic.
It's a bit like "just do some exercise" for depression. It's not wrong in that if you achieve it it'll help, but it's also something that's common knowledge and a lot easier said than done in practice, so it's not useful advice and kind of irritating when you hear it over and over again.
Keto also helps (sometimes) with depression though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7jg6wlD6gY (The Truth About Treatment Resistant Depression: Part One (Breaking the Myth))
And it's not "just do some keto" in this case. You have to be very strict.
But there are many dosages of keto diet and you have to do it correctly.
Epilepsy keto is hard for real and takes commitment. You will never eat modern food again in your life. But better than life-long-suffering just to eat cake.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It looks like Norway's oil revenue per capita is somewhere between $20,000 and $90,000, while the USA's is between $200 and $800, depending on how you calculate it.
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.
Freedom is ridiculous. It's not what Americans have nor want. It's free in a warzone. True freedom is total chaos. Americans do not have nor want real freedom.
Concerns over gun violence (or violence in general) are largely misplaced. Almost all of the violent crime happens in a handful of cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington DC that have been wrecked by decades of failed progressive policies. And even in those cities the violence is concentrated in few bad neighborhoods. We need to fix those places: the residents shouldn't have to live in gang war zones. But at the same time those aren't the same neighborhoods that HN users would live anyway. The rest of the USA is no more violent than most other developed countries.
The state statistics are meaningless. As I already explained above, almost all of the murders in every state are concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods. It's a very localized problem.
As for the specific cities you mentioned, policies enacted by local governments over decades generally fall into the progressive category. State and federal governments certainly share some blame for the problem but because the causes are mostly local any solutions will also have to be local.
If gun violence is concentrated in a few neighborhoods and all states contain such neighborhoods, then state statistics do matter, don't they?
We can all agree that taking away peoples' guns would lead to less gun violence. (This is the part where you say "but that's impossible anyway" or "but the 2nd amendment" which doesn't really refute my point)
It didn't work in Canada. The criminals still have guns. Mind you when you share a large border with a nation that has lots of guns how effective could it possibly be? I'm not blaming the USA, I'm blaming the Canadian politicians for failing to take this into account.
Not sure what is progressive about the fact that one can easily obtain a gun. Pool with many legal guns makes it easier to obtain it illegal one as well.
There would be even less violence in Mexico if they were not bordering USA.
That’s just not true. I’m from Europe but lived in Boulder for several years. For example this shooting (1) happened 5 min walking distance from my home. My kids’ school had several lockdowns due to gun-related stuff in the neighborhood. Something like that is unimaginable in Europe, and big part of why we moved back.
I can’t name any polices per se, but it is very well documented how corrupt the city governments of Baltimore and Chicago are, and have been for decades and decades.
Hard to serve in the best interest of the people what that was never the goal to begin with.
Well I would agree those places are full of corruption, but I wouldn't call them progressive places or politicians, and I certainly wouldn't blame their corruption on anything to do with progressive policies.
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.
Yes, but that is not what you mean when you say it like this.
If you really stood behind this, then you would believe that the cleaning personnel who wakes up at ungodly hours take make sure areas are clean should be amongst the highest earners.
Academics in particular are not really aligned with what it means to work.
Edit: academic work is high risk, high reward. But procrastinating for weeks upon weeks to write a paper last minute is IMHO not hard work - though it can be valuable work.
I believe most academics are mostly kidding themselves on how hard they think they actually work. Haha. But I mean if you enjoy your job who cares how much you want to do it?
The problem is do people work at all. Finland has had structural unemployment problem for decades, and second highest unemployment in Europe. The cost of this is high for the working members of society.
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).
Fair, my strong impression has been that average people in most countries in Europe put relatively less into private pension schemes than equivalent Americans. I know that is the case in the UK, for example.
My state pension alone in the US is notionally ~$4k per month when I reach retirement age (plus all the other subsidies and free stuff). Despite this, Americans are pretty much indoctrinated from birth to assume that won’t exist and to have alternative plans. This leads to the interesting phenomenon where many people that weren’t particularly well off during their working years find themselves relatively flush with money during retirement because they were operating from a pessimistic model.
That leads to a much bigger phenomenon where seniors are catered to in the US with products and services and treated with a lot of attention and ads while many seniors in Europe (especially Eastern Europe) live on government mercy and in horrible conditions.
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.
The paper sites Wage compression as the primary reason for income equality. I doubt that would go over well with most of the engineers at the US tech companies.
The thing that is often missed is that with high taxes and resulting high labour cost, you get high productivity. Simply because low productivity is not profitable.
This results in bad service, high quality goods and strong utilisation of capital goods.
But as others have noted the wealth disparity is increasing thanks to new policies and low interest rates leading to asset inflation.
Having worked at a company with a collective agreement in Sweden, nothing within it restricted my salary or my ability to negotiate as an individual. Upon coming into effect, the agreement simply gave me more vacation days and set a minimum yearly raise to keep up with inflation (one that was always surpassed and enhanced further with individual performance bonuses etc).
Why specifically to Norway, and not let's say to Tanzania?
I worked with bright folks located in Tanzania in ~2017 and developers salaries were like 1/10 of Canadian.
Sure, a general inflexibility. This is in particular present in doing extra when software is failing, staying up to date with one's vocation, and backing/assuming convictions.
It is also not binary, and likely more a selection bias, as the people who are actually driven already left these job markets (... To earn more elsewhere).
Sweden has the most booming tech sector in Europe so far, and the games industry around Stockholm and Malmö rival Paris.
Not sure where you got that they're lazy, some of the most hardworking and skilled people I've met are here.
They also understand that a mind that does not let go does not grow, like a bodybuilder overtraining: rest is an important part of growth. Do you mean that?
Right, the real crisis is all those Nordics sneaking into the U.S....
It’s the hottest destination. Who would not swap six weeks paid vacation and universal healthcare for a $100,000 out-of-network ER bill and five days off a year?
Are we, really? I've several times read accounts about how hard it is for Europeans to migrate to Canada. Many accounts specifically relate to social status - single men having much worse results than single women, or couples migrating together.
The elite in Canada want people from countries who have lower work environment expectations.
Over the last 5 years Canada has taken in hundreds of thousands of new immigrants. The govt has a plan to boost the population to 100 Million.
As a result Canada now has the highest housing costs in the world. The Universal Health care system has a massive backlog. Emergency rooms have very long waiting periods and you cant get a family doctor.
At present the population has rebelled so the elite have reduced the inflow somewhat temporarily.
Can you share more about these accounts? I've never heard of single men vs women having a harder time, but I don't know many Europeans who've emigrated to Canada recently.
1) It makes me wonder where the surplus goes. Invested back into the corporations, so that the people who run them have a large amount of power? That would be dystopian. Unless I'm making an incorrect assumption, like...
2) Is it only downward compression, or does it perhaps act both upwardly AND downward? So there's little profit unspoken for, and anyone participating in the labor market is receiving a roughly equal piece of the economic output (or, at least, within a relatively narrow band).
3) That would suggest something rather radical to the (neo)liberal mindset of there being no ceiling on what spoils of productivity one can claw to oneself: instead, an acknowledgment that we're all roughly equal humans giving up a roughly equal portion of life, time, energy, and freedom to labor, regardless of the prerequisites to be competent at that labor (or of the opportunities to exploit one's position).
4) As for implications for other countries, I wonder if there are any for those in which social, racial, and class hierarchies are deeply embedded. Can the kind of robust wage bargaining described emerge even without all of that rectified? Maybe it's what catalyzes that rectification?
1) In Finland most of the value is given out as dividends. We have a chronic underinvestment problem where large companies don’t have long term strategies so they dole out a comparatively large amount of value as dividends vs. re-investing the money for future profits. As a result, the stock market is skewed towards dividend-companies vs. growers.
Re 2: salaries are very seldom too low. Think of waiters cleaners etc. they have pretty decent salaries. At least in Sweden where I live. This is the effect of unions being strong, a general culture that values work and workers, and historical and political context. Also scarcity plays a role, there are few people and many professions are hard to find.
Having said that, it's no socialist Heaven either, wealth inequality is among the highest in developed countries and unemployment is very high especially among the young people with immigrant background. Racism, or a certain suspicion of strangers, is latent and affects access to jobs. Inflation is high, housing market is as crazy as elsewhere, and living costs are not low.
One of the things I learned from some Norwegians on a trip to Norway:
In Norway, if a restaurant abuses its staff, it's not just the staff that will strike or sympathetic customers who will organize a boycott. It's the plumbers who won't show up to fix the sink that breaks, the carpenters who won't show up to patch up a dented door jam or install a new shelf, and the shippers who won't drive ingredients out to the restaurant anymore.
In the US, that kind of coordinated cross-discipline striking is explicitly illegal (I'd have to go look up my history to confirm, but I believe that was related to the federal intervention to stop the rail strikes because it disrupted mail delivery).
So freedom but not like that?
I think if more of the world, especially people living in the US, had more of the Norway mentality, "big tech" abuse wouldn't have taken hold in the first place (e.g. the Apples and Googles and Metas of today would never get their sinks installed, let alone 3rd party apps made).
Here's what I've seen first-hand in a "labour-friendly" country. An employee doesn't show up at his workplace a few days a week, for several months, without doctor's notes or any real reason. Employer finally fires them. Employee goes to court and after a year gets a $20k compensation for "unlawful termination", even though his absence on the workplace was documented (but not properly processed, apparently).
Nordic countries are higher-trust than America is, and so sometimes concepts like this do not need to be formally defined: "you know it when you see it" is a valid concept when people have sufficient dignity and respect for self and others as to not claim abuse when it's not actually present.
This breaks down in a system with different game-theoretical Schelling points - different "default strategies". If the default mode of behaviour for a large constituency of participants is to exploit all available weaknesses in the system, then the system has to become more formalized, more defensive, and eventually has to put firewalls around anything that could be exploited.
This is among the reasons why socialized medicine / welfare / etc work better in some countries than others. If it comes coupled with a high sense of dignity that makes one not want to fling oneself upon the commons unless it's strictly necessary, then it can do well; but if everyone wants to take everything that isn't nailed down, you simply cannot afford to offer as much, ever.
Abuse is typically things like not paying their salary, withholding holiday contributions, breaking contractual scheduling obligations, threatening the staff with termination or reduced pay, and a host of other apparently normal behavior for certain kinds of employers.
“Unlawful termination” is only a thing when it is either in breach of contract, or discrimination. Typical contracts in Scandinavia mandate a 1 month notice in advance of termination. I don’t know why you would think that’s unreasonably long. (And yes, the social security net is the reason it can be so short.)
Probably best not to shoehorn in your specific experience into this comment this way, it’s not really applicable outside of your desire to start yourself off on a rant
I'm not saying that stuff like that doesn't happen, but what do you think is the ratio between employers abusing their employees compared to employees abusing their employers?
And with the different kinds of abuse, which "side" do you think causes the most genuine harm to the other though their actions?
> In the US, that kind of coordinated cross-discipline striking is explicitly illegal (I'd have to go look up my history to confirm, but I believe that was related to the federal intervention to stop the rail strikes because it disrupted mail delivery).
No, it’s just a straight up federal law that bans striking in the railroad and airline industries:
The US’s people (by proxy of its democratically elected leaders) believe some workers deserve fewer rights than others.
It isn’t so different than an informal caste system, except it is far more flexible and allows a few to break through, especially if they can prove their economic mettle. The US makes a lot more sense once you realize much (the majority, I would say) accept that some people deserve more than others.
What is most important is trying to not be at the bottom, and staying ahead of those below you. Another easy example is the superior unions for cops and firefighters, who are typically used to maintain the status quo (similar to a king’s guards). These union members will readily support leaders who want to weaken other unions.
Income inequality is a red herring, and too often it is chanted without any thought given to what support for equality means or why inequality is ostensibly opposed. There are, of course, two classes of reasons that people have for supporting income equality.
1. opposition to income inequality per se
2. opposition to something other than income inequality, with inequality as a proxy for that thing
For (2), the person may either believe that income inequality necessarily results in the problem they're concerned about, or they may be confusing it with inequality per se.
For (1), one motivation is the classic envy of the have-nots for the haves, or a basic confusion about justice where it is misunderstood as entailing equality.
The first real problem is poverty. A double income upper middle class family with a $600k home is not equal to the millionaire or billionaire down the road in terms of income, but they are not suffering because of that inequality. Furthermore, the easiest form of equality is universal poverty, something socialist/communist regimes were quite good at arranging. Obviously, this kind of equality is undesirable.
A second problem is the influence money has in politics. This isn't the result of inequality per se, only the deranged relationship to money that people, including those in politics, have. The lust for money is the real culprit here, not money per se.
A third problem, related to the first, is one arising from ineffective markets. On the one hand, this might be the result of central planning or onerous regulation and other features of economies in collectivist societies. These can crush personal initiative and responsibility, and reduce the individual to an element of the collective, thus diminishing the dignity of the person. On the other hand, while free markets are quite good at allocating goods, they aren't infallible, and an idolatry of the market can encourage a participation in the market that flouts morality and regard for human dignity, resulting in a market that instead of contributing to the freedom and good of its participants, becomes a force for exploitation in which some enrich themselves through unjust practices. (I would also add a radical, totalizing libertarianism ideology that reduces the human person to an economic actor - full stop - and construes all human activity as economic, thus dehumanizing market participants.)
I would encourage people to read JPII's 1991 encyclical "Centesimus Annus" for a balanced summary critique of the dominant economic orders of the last century or so as a corrective for their errors.
Inequality can be a cause of suffering, as it can price average individuals out of essential, limited resources like power, land, and skilled labor. For instance, some combination of skill and knowledge held by a few scientists could be applied to develop technology that improves the lives of millions or to create luxury entertainment for a handful. In an environment of extreme inequality, the concentrated wealth of a few elites can more than the wealth of a million average individuals. Because of that the rare talent is more likely to be used for entertainment purposes.
That's completely counter to how capitalism actually works in practice. With every luxurious technology reserved for the wealthy there are always inevitably improvements in scale and delivery that make these luxuries accessible to the masses. Cell phones, cars, internet access, food delivery service, chauffeurs (in the form of Uber), airline travel, etc all used to be luxuries of the rich. In a short time, prices came down, and became accessible to most people.
Most of the wealthiest people in the world made their billions by selling something used my millions or hundreds of millions of people.
The same thing would happen by focusing on technologies that improve more lives right from the start. Instead of cars we'd be developing better public transit, instead of food delivery we'd be developing ways to deliver food to the people who actually need it, etc. Developing luxury goods and hoping it'll at some point benefit the public is an inefficient way to improve lives.
I did a couple of quick searchers with help of ChatGPT, and it seems like in Norway, at least, a tenured professor would get ~$50k post-tax, a primary school teacher ~$35k, and a cleaner ~$20k. If anything, such low income inequality seems dystopian. I would expect talented and ambitious people rather move elsewhere.
The average Norwegian monthly salary across every working person is USD 5902 per month - before tax. That works out to USD 70824 per year including 4-5 weeks paid holiday. These are public numbers https://www.ssb.no/en/arbeid-og-lonn/lonn-og-arbeidskraftkos...
Taxes are progressive which means if you earn below average you’re taxed a lot less than if you’re over average. If you have an average salary you’ll get taxed around 25%. If you have a salary twice the average you’ll close in on twice the tax, before any deductions.
Paid holiday, free kindergarten, free medical support and pensions savings are included in the tax you and your employers pay. The employer pays 14% tax on your salary.
This approach has its benefits: excellent infrastructure, clean cities, well maintained countryside, low crime rate and less pressure to "do, do, do it now!" Not everything is about money.
That said, the global economy is about the money, so I have a strong suspicion that this fact will hit Europe hard in the next few decades.
If you see life as some game to optimize only for yourself not the people around you then for sure as very high earners, easy to move somewhere else, and some do. But from my point of view that’s a sad outlook on life and it’s not all one sided, that professor payed nothing for top of the line education, or child care, or 9 months parental leave, or medical etc etc. The high earners put away some money instead and enjoy lower taxes than us on that part.
But mostly it’s the idea of people deserving a decent life and high base life quality anyway. Most of my colleagues instead come here from other countries.
Although not tenured yet, as a professor I know that not many could do the job I do, and I count myself lucky I don’t have to spend my time cleaning (or teaching in primary school for that matter). That I also get more paid than them feels like double dipping.
Remember, the deal includes universal health care, tuition-free university, government-backed sick pay, five or six weeks of paid vacation, and more.
I'm from Sweden, which has a similar system. I could not have afforded to attend university in the US system. Here, I could -- with my (government low-interest) student loans being spent only on my living expenses, not tuition. As a result, Sweden has an extra engineer we otherwise wouldn't have, with a good salary contributing to the tax base.
Isn't it more dystopian that people doing jobs as essential as cleaning have to live in poverty? Just because everyone can clean doesn't mean the people doing it don't deserve a good life. Without people doing those "easy" jobs those talented people wouldn't have time to build and use their talents. The cleaners enable the talented people and so deserve a fair share of what they produce.
As a Nordic person, that kind of income difference looks realistic (without having checked). But I could never had imagined the difference to be considered as dystopian. If we would dig deeper into this, I would expect our different views to have something to do with differences on what expectations we have, values in life and how we relate to inter-personal statuses.
That sounds like what the paper is saying. To paraphrase, the equality doesn't come from tax redistribution as much as a flatter wage curve. I don't think they are saying it is good or bad, just explaining how it happens.
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
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