Income Equality in Nordic Countries: Myths, Facts, and Lessons
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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
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.
Nordic countries have high VAT but that's hardly going to hurt you.. On the other hand Sweden has less property tax than the US.
I guess if you consume services then that will be more expensive in the Nordics, since tax on salaries is high.
If you have a 1.5M balance sheet, you can pay yourself 120k euros in dividends annually at an effective tax rate of only 7.5%.
Let’s just say that small businesses and professionals have very good lobbyists. An employee making 120k / year pays over 40% tax.
This creates a tremendous incentive for professionals to incorporate and use every trick in the books to build up a larger balance sheet on paper.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Finnish companies are also an outlier in paying extremely high dividends.
https://www.skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/eng...
"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).
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.
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.
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.
That's why we don't get legislation to fix the issues you cite year after year.
Wealth hording leads to the government working more for the wealthy instead of the working class.
There will always be wealthy and powerful people, but as Spock would say (sorry) "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one."
No, people need to start understanding the root causes of their problems.
History is replete with examples of rapacious elites trying to take peasant pitchforks and redirecting them.
>For Americans the big ones are: a health problem can destroy your life
Which is a problem because that destruction of your life is immensely profitable.
Which is a problem that wont be fixed while American government is plutocratically run.
Which is a problem that wont be fixed until wealth inequality is.
Then “he who pays the piper calls the tune” and here we are...
Smaller state and local elections are better, but that's not where the power or money goes.
Once you control the media you can just keep throwing mud at the few progressives that remain.
If progressives could wrest back control of party machinery and control a significant portion of the media then they would become "electable" again.
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.
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.
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.
https://data.worldhappiness.report/table?_gl=1*13j5g4a*_gcl_...
Ask someone from the Nordics about housing prices. Do you think they’ll change the subject?
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.
This is extremely little money compare to the alternative.
What makes it important for Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy or Liechtenstein?
https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2023-11-28/lisbon-shoul...
If Russia.cobquers Ukraine they will use the people of Ukraine against the rest of Europe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are saying lots of things but there is no coherency, no strategy, no alternatives.
There is an answer, but probably only an actual Ukrainian “nationalist” can tell you. And it was only a couple of years.
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.
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.
And between payroll taxes and the fact that stocks, 401ks, etc depend on economic growth, things will turn real shitty...
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.
We also have immigration against that. Lots of people in their late 10s or early 20s ready to start contributing to the economy. But most western countries have to much right wing populism going on to realize that that's a solution and work on proper integration efforts. Easier to pull the criminal foreigners card and collect votes at the next election.
Which project was that?
Curiously there's no English wiki page for it, but machine translation is good these days:
Yes pretty much, and hello form Norway.
Everyone here needs to make money and save everything they can right now. If you're not saving 50%+ of your income you AGMI
FIRE -> Financial Independency, Retire Early.
AGMI -> Are Gonna Make It?
But you just have to assume based on context here that he intends to say "Aren't Gonna Make It"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Also with a privately owned company there's not really any means to do this in a hostile manner)
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.
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.
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.
Precisely, it's a nonsense metric that doesn't anything about poverty at all which is something that truly matters.
- 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.
SAAB, Bosch, ThyssenKrup, and others are similarly structured.
They are non profit charity designing furniture for the humanity, what taxes are you talking about?
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.
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…
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.
It has long been known that over consuming carbs and sat fats leads to long term health issues, easily measured by excess weight.
And yet, the vast majority of people over consume.
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.
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.
(The other fiction which causes problems is the idea that the amount of willpower required is the same for everyone)
Source: try keto diet with only saturated fats (like I do) and its great for weight loss (animal fat, coconut oil).
I have watched many people lose weight with one or both of these methods, naturally.
I’ll never understand the pushback.
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.
This feels like a “the truth hurts” kind of thing. Or a “personal responsibility isn’t my problem!” thing.
Maybe that’s the whole point though, anything that requires personal responsibility and accountability is rebuked.
So yes, at certain point a person is responsible for themselves, but on the other hand, if you have a goal of reducing obesity, you're not going to get anywhere by just saying 'well, everyone who's obese is responsible, and I am going to do nothing about it but remind them of it'.
It will take some years for people to change.
What's funny is weight loss is extremely easy (with keto) and people still fail at large doing it inefficiently (with carbs).
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.
The hyper-individualism of modern America is something that has developed fairly recently, even if it had earlier roots.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax#Timeline_of_intro...
And as I already wrote:
> 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.
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.
Yes, this is an excellent point.
It's still true that the pay and conditions were awful, but it was clearly something people chose to do.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, obviously she didn't get there because of merit... unbelievable this exchange.
So your main point is that Harris, who was in the spot to become president for all of four years if something happened to Biden, was only there as a generic woman of color? This is in a way a worse insult than if it had been just jealousy. Do you honestly believe that the slob you voted for is there on merit? And never mind his sidekick? Harris has more merit than either of those two grifters combined.
For your sake I hope that one day you're going to snap out of the groove that you are in. But by the looks of it the more likely end game is that you will dig yourself in further and further until there really is no way back.
Just for a 10 minute exercise: imagine you are wrong about all this and that in a decade you look back at the end result. Then realize that there is such a thing as minimization of regret and that this radicalization path that you - as you admitted yourself - are on does not offer any outs other than ever more convoluted rationalizations which your original self from just a few years ago would have been horrified at. The reason I keep talking to you is because I hope that somewhere in there the guy that we knew before he went off into the woods is still there and is still able to use common sense instead of the sense that words on paper matter more than people. Probably I'm the idiot though and I should just give up on you.
Being a "woman of color" was Biden's stated reason for picking Harris. She has no merit as a political leader--someone who is able to inspire people to action. She had to drop out of the race in 2019 being she was polling terribly in her home state: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/03/politics/kamala-harris-califo.... Listen to the post-mortems of 2024 being done by folks Mark Halpern. Biden's own team thought that Harris wasn't ready.
I saw her in person at an Asian American fundraising event in Iowa in 2019. It was just her and Andrew Yang. She gave a canned speech and ran to her tour bus and hid after the event. She was awful. Given Biden's age, the obviously correct play in 2020 was to nominate Elizabeth Warren, who is a gifted populist politician. I saw her in 2019 as well, and people were literally crying when they would meet her to take selfies. Harris, meanwhile, was hiding in her bus, because she's awkward and doesn't actually like crowds.
Everything was out there for anyone whose eyes were open to see. But the party is full of weirdos who are obsessed with skin color--like how you couldn't help but bring slavery and colonialism into this unrelated discussion--and they nominated her because it was part of "the arc of history." It brings me endless joy that this view forced them into a course of action that cost them so dearly, and so quickly.
> Do you honestly believe that the slob you voted for is there on merit?
In a Presidential system, "merit" is being able to win over and lead a coalition of voters. That's what made Bill Clinton and Barack Obama extraordinary politicians. Trump has merit in the same way. Trump took over one of the two major parties, overthrew its establishment, and made it so someone named "Bush" can't even win an election for dog catcher in Texas. Whatever else you think about him, he's an incredibly gifted politician, while Harris is a terrible one.
Yes, you fit right in. Think about what you just wrote.
> Whatever else you think about him, he's an incredibly gifted politician, while Harris is a terrible one.
He's a gifted agitator, he's not a gifted politician. A gifted politician knows how to govern, and build consensus, Trump is completely clueless (or hiding it remarkably well). His main shticks are division and destruction, not unification and creation.
So if you are looking to bring about hardship and chaos you did the right thing by voting for him.
About half the variation in personality traits is biologically heritable: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-55834023. Even political ideology is moderately heritable: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...
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.”
In the EU (I have no idea about America) tobacco is heavily (and I mean heavily in some countries) taxed because of this.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
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.
But I guess it works both ways?
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.
It's however relevant here to illustrate how insane the US healthcare situation is, in that Americans pay enough in taxes towards healthcare to provide universal healthcare if structured better, but chooses not to.
As an example of how to provide cost effective universal care, the NHS is a shining beacon. If the UK spent comparable amounts per capita to comparably wealthy countries to upgrade it, it'd be 20-30% more expensive, and a lot better, and still vastly cheaper than US healthcare overall.
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?"
It was quite shocking.
Come to Poland. This kind of egoism becomes more and more rampant.
You can’t really compare dollar to krone the difference of a US salary to a Norwegian salary.
I’m not sure how to explain it for those who haven’t lived in the nordics, but you don't need a high paying income to live a good life.
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.
I mean, if you value other things, that fine, but to claim something doesn't exist when it clearly does is rather narrow in vision.
It doesn't take much googling to find examples of speech laws in Europe (for one example) that would have Americans gasping.
Birmingham, St. Louis & Memphis have the highest levels of gun violence, though? Not sure if those are the most "progressive" places.
Also Mississippi (more than 10x worse than e.g. Massachusetts), Louisiana, Alabama are the top 3 states by gun homicide rate.
If Mississippi was a country it would be in the top 10 (between Mexico and Columbia) by gun related murder rate which is quite an achievement..
Massachusetts
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.
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)
Yeah schools are pretty local.
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.
Hard to serve in the best interest of the people what that was never the goal to begin with.
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.
I’m not sure if that answers your question.
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.
> 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.
Regardless - impenetrable housing markets are not a consequence of equality, so you are kind of self contradicting.
Do you believe people who work harder or do things that others are unwilling/unable to do are not entitled to more than others?
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.
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
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.
We can all make quips.
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).
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.
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).
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's huge! Does the US state pension scale based on your lifetime contributions (amount, not just years)? Because int he UK, if I retired with a full state pension today, I'd get $1345 per month. To achieve this you need to have contributed about a minimum threshold per year for 35 years. There is no way to increase this amount, only decrease it by not meeting the 35 years requirement. So to me, given the rhetoric about the US, $4k per month state pension along is insane.
Did you mean to type per month here? That's an enormous state pension.
I know previous inflation does not infer future inflation But if we use the previous 30 years of inflation to project the future, this money would be worth $882-ish today.
I’m not sure how you live, but that doesn’t cover ground rent on my apartment and food today.
The major point is that private pensions are common, and they are investments made by banks (I think similar to a 401k). I think its mainly Germans who don’t like private pensions.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
There is a scale factor here that is way, way different than many other countries: there are significantly fewer people.
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).
No, it’s just a straight up federal law that bans striking in the railroad and airline industries:
https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/16...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Labor_Act
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.
edit: for the people who missed it, I was making a joke about the username of the person I was replying to. Not actually a conspiracy theorist
What exactly counts as "abuse"?
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).
“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.)
And with the different kinds of abuse, which "side" do you think causes the most genuine harm to the other though their actions?
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.
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).
However, when they boot you, and you are not up to date with you skills and knowledge - the lazyness has been worse for you, than for the company.
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?
Seen plenty of Americans that got comfy in the nordics (also efficient but 40 hours max).
Also seen other countries politicians change rules that directly affected how hard people work. It’s not rocket science and programming is one of the most fun jobs to be doing so plenty would jump at the opportunity.
Instead I see people go home and try to code something at home to increase their salaries.
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.
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.
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.
But then again, it also ensures that pricing and governance in the broader system is in check.
So it is either this or an oligarchy where people feed their egos
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.
That seems like the opposite of dystopian to me.
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.
[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
Most of the wealthiest people in the world made their billions by selling something used my millions or hundreds of millions of people.
How about the view that inequality is fundamentally unfair and unjust because
(1) It is unfair and unjust if some have more goods than others due to factors that they are not fundamentally responsible for
(2) If determinism is true then no one is fundamentally responsible for anything
(3) Determinism is true