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Comment by jessedhillon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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