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Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

Sure, mainly I wanted to point out that, there is no conflict between providing a strong social safety net policy and having billionaires. The only reason to avoid the safety net would seem to be a myth that somehow others have to suffer for success to be possible.

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I feel like the conflict in the spirit of the article is to create billionaires, not just have billionaires. 'Create' is not a great word, but 'create an environment that allows for creation of new wealth' is a bit verbose. Granted, I'm sure in the US, very few of the billionaires grew up in meager means, but quite a lot became billionaires under their own endeavors. Admittedly, it is largely secular (i.e. technology), but I think that dovetails.

But out of the top 10 richest in the US, only the Waltons are heirs. I would say it's a bit of a distortion, since the all of them combined I think is still larger than any other US individual.

Looking at Sweden, it looks like a lot of it is inherited, certainly most of the top 10. And like 1/4 are H&M, Tetra Pak, and Ikea alone. The new 'household names' are spotify and minecraft.

Norway is obviously smaller, but surprisingly, quite a lot of them got the three commas from their own businesses. The last-ditch cop out there is the typical Norway is in general an outlier due to being a highly developed nation with oil money. However, most of the billionaires are not there due to energy.

I'm not familiar with the wealth situation in Scandinavia, but I just want to point out: what matters is the numbers of millionaires/billionaires created, not just the number existing. For example, these higher numbers could be leftover nobles or aristocracy.

Also, it's a pretty unconvincing comparison to pick a small population country to benchmark the US against.

Surveys of some eu nations rank them as friendly for business creation - Sweden Denmark and Switzerland rank pretty high. Universal healthcare at half the cost of the US and built into, but independent of your taxes is pretty nice for starting businesses.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/open-for-business...

All of which is an entirely separate set of points from the point you were making about the number of billionaires.

If one is concerned about wealth creation as your reply to my original data brought up, it would seem that sentiment about friendliness of business creation would be relevant. Not necessarily accumulation of wealth from winning bets a decades ago.

Yes, well on the one hand you shared evidence of actual outcomes and presented that as meaningful, and that's what I challenged. Weaving theories about how social benefits are good for entrepreneurship is not much of a counterpoint here, unless you can connect it back to the same outcomes in question.

I’m not writing a thesis here. Merely providing a counter example to imho a myth that wealth creation needs a weak social safety net.

In goverment policy there is very rarely a closed form proof of any policy - we are almost always stuck with collecting large and small data points and needing to form a policy based on incomplete information and theory. But mostly it seems it’s matched up with motivations and biases - which are worth examining.

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