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> The top 50% of Americans are better off than the top 50% of people in Sweden

So just hope you're not in the bottom 50%?

We should also think about what "better off" actually means. Maybe a healthy society cares about more than just individual income and "opportunity for success." Sweden, and just about every other modern country has much better health care and public services, and a much saner attitude toward work and leisure, even in spite of attacks on the welfare state in recent decades (the idea that it was some kind of disaster and had to be saved by the capitalists is nonsense).

It seems to me that the top 50% of Swedes not doing as well as the top 50% of Americans is kind of the whole point.

A society should be judged not based on which serves the wealthiest half the best, but how it treats its most disadvantaged.

That's not to say that capitalism hasn't done great things for us, I just think we've let it run a bit amok here in the States.

I commend billionaires for their charity, but I condemn the tax system which makes it voluntary.

That's saying 160 million Americans are better off than 4.3 million Swedes. That is the entire point.

The relative population is not the point. Sweden's lower Gini coefficient is the point.

The fact that the bottom 160 million Americans are worse off than the bottom 4.3 million Swedes is the point.

The bottom 160 million Americans live better than billionaires did 100 years ago.

> 45% of all global wealth is concentrated in just 4.6% of the world's population.

Why do you say that like it's a good thing?

Well..it's a good thing for Americans.

Also, it's not like America went and gobbled up wealth from all the other countries. America largely created the wealth in-house.

The top 50% of Americans are better off than the top 50% of people in Sweden. That's 160 million people doing better than Sweden, I call that an extraordinary success.

But it has little to do with the differences in the two economic systems. The USA is rich because Europeans discovered a very large geographically isolated land mass that was only thinly populated by pre-literate people with technology that was primitive even by ancient standards. How would you not expect such abundance to produce an extremely wealthy society?

Sure, settling a continent and building infrastructure up from nothing is hard work, but Europeans had a couple of millenia worth of practical experience and how-to manuals on the best way to go about this, and cheerfully reinstituted slavery, which had worked out so well for the Roman empire. Without denigrating all the genuine hard work and innovation deployed by many generations of settlers (and not only from Europe), their labor was far from the only economic input. The US has vast tracts of agriculturally productive land, huge mineral wealth, and extremely favorable strategic geography. If you could go back a few thousand years, wave a historical magic wand and give ocean-capable shipping and navigation to the Romans or Han Chinese, they too would have established a mighty economic and military empire on the North American land mass.

I'm broadly pro-capitalist, but I can't take you seriously when you ignore the massive economic advantage of being practically handed an entire continent to play with. You would have to be staggeringly incompetent not to become a world power.

The bottom 1/3 are better off in Sweden than in America however, not much debate on that.

Not only does Sweden not have the same sort of permanent underclass that the US seems intent on cultivating, they probably don't spend as much of their wealth on security services designed to protect the property of the well-off from the poor, whereas something like 1/5 of America's labor force is devoted to guard labor: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/GarrisonAmerica2007.pdf

While the US is certainly wealthier in fiscal terms, this country does have some massive quality-of-life problems, and there's an almost pathological antipathy to measuring the cost of economic externalities - another symptom, I suggest, of having so much land available.

> The top 50% of Americans are better off than the top 50% of people in Sweden. That's 160 million people doing better than Sweden, I call that an extraordinary success.

Are you suggesting the median American is wealthier than the wealthiest Swede?

The top 50% specifically would not be the median at all.

The net median wealth per adult is higher in America than in Sweden however. That number was roughly equal as of 2013, since then US real estate and equities have gone up significantly. US median wealth tends to be heavily influenced particularly by real estate (with US real estate values nearly back to the all-time highs).

I'm suggesting the top 50% in America are better of than the top 50% in Sweden. Not that the median is better in America.

In nearly every respect. Access to culture. Economic opportunities. University opportunities. The types of businesses you can build. The variety of industries and jobs you have access to. The sheer scale of things you can work on or have access to economically or otherwise. The research and innovation, the scale of the scientific output you can be part of. The cultural output you can tap into or contribute to that will be consumed in pretty much every corner of the globe. And on it goes.

Sweden does amazingly well for 7 or 8 million people. America does amazingly well for ~160 million people. Sweden isn't going to scale - their population has increased by 2 million in 55 years or so (they can't scale much for obvious reasons). I consider America's accomplishment, that it has benefited so many more people to such a high degree, to be drastically more impressive. In the US, the top 50% are better off than Europe's top 50%, and the bottom 50% in the US are also better off than Europe's bottom 50% (see: Eastern Europe).

Anyone else find it slightly revealing, and obviously disappointing, that any conversation about wealth nowadays only seems to encompass financial wealth, as though all other forms of wealth [1] were either redundant or meaningless. I often wonder when i see headlines like "1 percent of the world's people control 50 percent of its wealth" how the other forms of wealth are distributed and if indeed having more of one predisposes you to have less of all the rest?

[1] - Whatever they may be, spiritual, happiness, obviously off the top of my head, i've ran out here because it's not a topic i usually hear discussed, any other suggestions?

Surely the shift in the net median wealth based on real estate prices rather than any meaningful change in the real assets held by the average Swede or American in the past couple of years calls into question the validity of net median wealth as a meaningful measure of prosperity...

Not that there's much doubt about the relative prosperity of the top 10% of US citizens compared with the top 10% of Swedes, especially if they're not living somewhere like SF or NY, but I can't help thinking the people in the lower brackets notice the difference more. It's not like a Swede who's sufficiently smart to go to Harvard (and wealthy enough to pay for the course) can't go there if they're dissatisfied with the free higher education on offer in their own country. The parents whose kids are vastly more likely to die in infancy in the US than Sweden have rather fewer options.

I think you're probably underestimating Europe's "access to culture" too...

> I'm suggesting the top 50% in America are better of than the top 50% in Sweden.

I'm asking you what that sentence means. Comparing groups is a tricky business. The richest half of Americans are better off in total? In the mean? In the median? Does it mean that the Pth percentile American is richer than the Pth percentile Swede, for all P>50?

I'm ignoring, for the moment, the ambiguity in which Americans are the "top" ones and what if means to be "better off". (wealth? income? education? lifespan? self-reported happiness?)

Maybe it would help if you point to some actual numbers by some social scientists that back up your claim.

I love this country (USA)