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Comment by coryrc | Hacker News Reader

Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the USA. Similar to the US, they also pay less in taxes than the middle class.

I wonder if Sweden has higher funding than the rest of the continent?

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> In the 2013 list, approximately 40 percent of Sweden’s billionaires are self-made while 60 percent inherited their wealth. In the United States, by contrast, 70 percent of billionaires are self-made while around 30 percent inherited their wealth. Once we exclude inherited wealth, the United States has around 1 self-made billionaire per million inhabitants compared to 0.6 for Sweden.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-agenda/guest-post-tino-sa...

50% of all wealth in the United States is inherited by the top 5% wealthiest families.

60% of all wealth in the United States is inherited.

Not particularly relevant. A significant chunk of that inherited wealth comes in the form of housing. The US has a total wealth of $105t, $36.2t of that is housing, which then ends up getting inherited by homeowners' children.

We're talking about how billionaires make their wealth as a proxy for entrepreneurship. It makes no sense to talk about how many billionaires Sweden has as a measure for their entrepreneurship if most of them inherited their wealth.

> > 50% of all wealth in the United States is inherited by the top 5% wealthiest families.

> Not particularly relevant. A significant chunk of that inherited wealth comes in the form of housing. The US has a total wealth of $105t, $36.2t of that is housing, which then ends up getting inherited by homeowners' children.

Feels utterly relevant; what's irrelevant is your fact that much of US wealth is bound up in housing: The top 5% wealthiest families are hardly likely to live in 50% of all housing.

Gates/Allen/Bezos/Jobs/Ellison/Google/Netflix/etc did not inherit their wealth.

Of the top 15, 5 inherited. You are right that billionaires are less likely to have inherited wealth.

...but they are still extremely likely to come from families with very strong political connections. Wealth is the byproduct.

Sweden has higher funding per capita, but does not answer why it became this way.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071105/value-of-investm...

Wow, thanks for the link! Four times Germany and almost the same as the USA.

You are using a false equivalence. Almost none of Swedish billionaires are in high tech.

Almost all of them are old people outside of tech

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_billionaires_b...

Overall, little of Europe's VC goes into the kind of things we talk about on this site. But if levels are much smaller than the USA it just produces another burden. Looking at these numbers, if I was going to get funding I would try Sweden before France.

Sweden is unusual in that way. You often hear about that it's one of the countries with the most equal income distribution but at the same time it has one of the highest wealth inequalities. Basically it's hard to make any money by working you have to own things.

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