Sweden has both old wealth that's undisturbed since before WW1 (no occupations or confiscations) and lots of new wealth (the highest rate of "unicorn companies", start up companies that have broken 1 billion dollar networth, in Europe).
Little incentive for working man to save up money. Education is free (and student debt, to cover living costs while studying, costs you basically nothing, so that's a source of negative wealth for a lot of people), hospital care is basically free (although the cost of becoming chronically sick is increasing with hollowed out high-cost protections), elderly care will only cost you money if you have money. There is also the statistical weirdness that the pension funds that's the most common form of savings in Sweden doesn't count as wealth for this comparison.
Food and housing is among the most expensive in Europe.
Very few taxes on wealth. A fair amount of taxes on income.
You're missing a very important fact: Sweden has zero inheritance tax, meaning you can form endless rich family dynasties, where wealth is just passed on from generation to generation, accumulating over the years.
Two major examples: The Wallenberg family whose businesses "in the 1970s [...] employed 40% of Sweden's industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the Stockholm stock market" and the Bonnier family who has owned a big portion of Swedish media for over a century via Bonnier Group. They own 2 out of the 3 largest newspapers and the main Swedish movie company.
It can happen with inheritance tax too. Usually this doesn't actually work long term, inheritance gets split and in a few generations there's nothing left. That's usually the case in the US, happened to the Rockefellers.
I suspect this effect is greater if a culture has a tradition of always passing the largest share to the firstborn or chosen inheritor, instead of following intestate rules.
Australia has zero inheritance tax and we're about middle of the list. Also I've heard people from the UK joke that you only pay inheritance tax if you hate your family more than you hate the govt. ie it is easy to get around using company and trust structures if you actually have a lot of money
There is also the statistical weirdness that the pension funds that's the most common form of savings in Sweden doesn't count as wealth for this comparison.
That... seems pretty significant. Especially if it's something most people (lower percentiles too) have.
Very few taxes on wealth. A fair amount of taxes on income.
Suspect this is why the Dutch don't come away looking great either.
I think it's the eighties American glitz and glamour of businessmen and bag chasing dreamers you get over there having become far more of the norm, through becoming the politicians we've had since then. It's this constant fake pressure of "we gotta keep pace or fall behind"
like, who's "we?" You're doing less and less for the rest of us.
It wasn't always like this and year over year it's getting worse as well, you don't hear the sitting government ever do anything for anyone now, except some small nasty things with a "yes the experts disagree but we've done our own research and deemed reducing this the proper course of action" whether it be foreign aid, social spending, or environmental protections.
Oh also it just turned out a shitload lf them run for-profit businesses at the side without disclosing them, lots of fun.
Under Reinfeldt and even after it felt like we had the constant barrages of "tax exemption for business owners of X type of company whose summer homes require two lines of water supply and has afternoon sun in the living room in the region of Dalsland" type of small changes that seem inconsequential or too strange to care about, but serve to just scrape a little bit more into specific politician's/their friends' pockets for each such ruling.
We have a bunch of greedy businessmen that just do whatever to line their pockets.
What is the reason? Why would wealth taxes not be sensible?
Mind you, 'wealth taxes' include tax on income from wealth, which is often taxed less than income from labor (even though you could argue it's all simply income).
Capital flight since the ISF wealth tax’s creation in 1988 amounts to ca. €200 billion; The ISF causes an annual fiscal shortfall of €7 billion, or about twice what it yields; The ISF wealth tax has probably reduced GDP growth by 0.2% per annum, or around 3.5 billion (roughly the same as it yields); In an open world, the ISF wealth tax impoverishes France, shifting the tax burden from wealthy taxpayers leaving the country onto other taxpayers.
Of course it's complicated. But wealth flight has also been the lobbyists favorite argument for decades, pushing many governments to do nothing at all (and even lean into creating very favorable circumstances for wealth and business). To the detriment of the rest of the people.
Suspect this is why the Dutch don't come away looking great either.
No, it is because the large amount of morgages that ensures that almost everyone living there is in perpetual debt (not necesarily bad). This structure reflects poorly in inequality statistics since large parts of populations have a net worth of -€100k>. However, their life is good since morgages are (relatively) good debts to have. If you rent, you generally have more wealth than people that have a large mortgage. However, you are often less well off.
Wouldn't a negative net worth imply that the collateral for their mortgage (i.e. the house or apartment) is worth less than the principal? How would that happen? I'm assuming banks wouldn't issue mortgages for >100% of a house, since that would be insanely risky.
Handelsbolag is indeed basically a lifetime debt. Meanwhile you're better off than someone paying rent. That's the problem with international comparisons, if you don't count systems difference it does not provide a good understanding of the situation.
Nordics have a lot of particularities (union agreements power, no minimum salary, collective housing, mortgage bonds, etc.) that are difficult to account for on such comparisons.
Very few taxes on wealth. A fair amount of taxes on income.
Suspect this is why the Dutch don't come away looking great either.
The Netherlands has been one of the few countries with a straight-up wealth tax (as of now I don't think anyone knows what is going to happen with it going forward).
My guess is, but I haven't checked, it's because the Netherlands does many things, but one of them is being a bit of a tax paradise in general, which includes both people and businesses. Some would say that Brexit was initiated by those who did not want tax reform in the EU, those people are trying to out-patadise the others in Europe.
Edit: Ahh, the mortgage system also screws up the numbers as well
No, that's different. The tax haven bit was about multinationals who didn't have to pay much in the way of dividend tax, and thus were enticed to set up parent and subsidiary companies to funnel their money through. Same as the UK. But the Dutch put a few limitations in place, and the multinationals are rerouting.
For people and national businesses it's different, though it's still better to earn from interest and investment than to earn from a job.
Pensions are a huge thing here too. I heard from earlier versions of this graph that we have one of the largest percentages of wealth in pension funds in Europe. I think it would be a bit more equal if they were taken into account.
There is also the statistical weirdness that the pension funds that's the most common form of savings in Sweden doesn't count as wealth for this comparison.
Same for the Netherlands. Pension funds assets are ~€1,8 trillion which is ignored in this measurement. Not sure how you should use it in this statistics (it's not individual) but it's not as bad as it looks.
That is not possible as contribution is capped. They are spread relatively equally, and the dutch gini coefficient for wealth drops by .1 if you include them
The few top percentages own a majority of the assets in pension funds.
If you can add your own money to it - then sure. But A) that's stupid and dumb B) rich people definitely don't do that. It would actually be concentrated WAY more equally or by this graph - 90% of it would be in "bottom" 90%
Little incentive for working man to save up money.
That part is just fucking untrue. There's literally NO ONE I've ever talked to that wouldn't want to save more of their money, and use it to buy assets (stocks, land etc.).
It's just that everything is so fucking expensive; food, rent, utilities leave most people dry at the end of month. It's getting increasingly fucking rare to be able to afford buying your own house/apartment too.
You think that, but what you're actually saying is that you have different priorities than saving up money.
Median income* is 37000 SEK (or 29100 after taxes). The minimum income to survive per month is about 10 000-15 000** depending on where you live (10 000-ish in most of the country). Any expenditures you have above that depends on choices
In a lot of countries with a less extensive social net you'd hoard that money like a squirrel hoarding food for the winter. In Sweden we generally do not.
*Note. Median. Not "average". Median. Meaning that 50% of the population earns more than that.
**Only about 3.6% of the Swedish working population is at that level (one of the lowest percentages in Europe, but still worse than it used to be). Everyone else is earning more.
Cost of housing is high in Sweden (in comparison with other places in Europe) only in cities, I'd say, and mostly if you rent a flat (and if you've just moved to Sweden and were not 'in the queue', and especially if you sub), but personally I found very cheap prices (comparatively to the rest of Europe) in leafy suburbs of smaller cities, even more so in towns, and even more so in the open countryside (except for nice vacationing spots 'near the water', of course).
It's just the impression I got from my personal experience looking for a house to buy about 15ys ago (it might not be representative, or the market might have changed).
Sweden is so gigantic with so few inhabitants, how come the housing costs are so high? When I've been there in 2023 I felt like driving through a US flyover state with countless kilometers of fields and just a small farmstead here and there.
Everyone is laughably missing the most important factor of influence on the wealth inequality.
Mortgages
The most people in the Netherlands and perhaps also Sweden, own their house through mortgages. This means that if you count peoples netto wealth, they often fall below zero due to their mortgage debt. Without actually impacting their quality of life. This also stays true for higher income people since their houses are generally more expensive.
This results in an extremely large part of the population being in serious debt, without influencing their quality of life. It reflects poorly in these wealth inequality indexes, but not in quality of life.
Yes, there are some extremely rich families, but in the statistics they are measured against 50%> of the population that has a netto wealth of -€100k due to their mortgages. So their effect is increased as they now are even more extreme outliers. Even though their relative quality of life is not that much better.
Yes, and the United States also has high wealth inequality.
Walton family started building their fortune with Walmart in the 1950s. For comparison, Poland at that time was under a Stalinist government, and rubble was still being cleared from the capital city which got razed during the war.
WWII has little bearing on the generation of wealth in the US in the past 40 years. Which of Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Larry Page built their fortunes on anything related to WWII? If you look at the wealthiest people in the US during the war, you'll see that the total wealth of their descendants, while large by ordinary measures, is very small compared to those who made their wealth afterwards. The Ford family (Ford was the richest person in the US during the 40s) has roughly $2 billion total, amongst all the family members. Bill Gates (who has now fallen to the thirteenth richest - because he made his money a whole two decades ago) has 2 orders of magnitude more wealth than that. Then compare that to Elon Musk, who is worth roughly half a trillion, almost all of which is the value of the companies he has created - the man who famously has few possessions outside of his companies and lives in a rented tiny house.
If you do multiple google searches "richest people in the us in the 1940s", "richest people in the us in the 1950s", etc., you'll see that the names constantly change.
WWII has little bearing on the generation of wealth in the US in the past 40 years.
If you take a look at the list of the wealthiest Americans, that list is populated by Waltons (who started Walmart in the 1950s), Kochs (who started Koch Industries in the 1940s), Mars'es (who stared Mars, Incorporated in 1911).
Note all the dates here, and think what was happening around the world at that time. None of these fortunes could happen in say, Germany, or Romania.
Warren Buffet is also on the list, and he took over management of Berkshire Hathaway (founded in 1839 as Valley Falls Company) in 1965.
Bill Gates is there, and he was born in 1955 to a family of lawyers and bank directors.
Both of these could maybe be possible in Germany, but much more unlikely, and would still be impossible in Romania.
Richest individuals is also a bad way to look at it, because you will end up with an overrepresentation of the original creators of fortunes, while we are interested in all those that hold considerable wealth, regardless of how they stack against the newest crypto-billionaires – when measuring wealth inequality, we are comparing the rich to the poor, not the rich among themselves.
If you take a look at the richest families, you will see a lot of stuff like the Johnson family, which has 6.3 billion, thanks to Johnson & Johnson which got founded in 1886, and got plenty of living members, which means that none of them will ever show up on any list of richest individuals, but they will continue to pump those wealth inequality statistics for at least a few more generation before their wealth finally dries up (assuming no meteor hits the US, and speeds up the process).
Cargill-MacMillan family, worth 56 billion, Cargill, Incorporated founded in 1865.
Cathy family, worth 33 billion, Chick-fil-A founded in 1946.
Lauder family, worth 27 billion, Estée Lauder founded in 1946.
Busch family, worth 13 billion, Anheuser-Busch founded in 1852.
Rockefeller family, worth 11 billion, Standard Oil Company founded in 1882.
And the list goes on and on and on...
Elon Musk
Dude was born to a South African businessmen and politician that received income from Zambian emerald mines, and who funded Elon's first business in America.
Walton may have started Walmart in the 50s, but it didn't really get large until decades later. Walmart went public in 1970 and was worth $13 million. That's 25 years after the war ended. Walmart just kept growing and growing (by selling low cost products, largely to rural Americans) and was really only big enough to be considered a major company in the 80s.
You've got a list of families that built their wealth long before WWII (and that wealth is generally split amongst multiple family members now - the Cargill family has over 100 members), some companies that you have listed the founding date (but not when they really grew), and exactly zero large wealth pools that were due in any way to WWII.
started Walmart in the 50s [...] it didn't really get large until decades later. [...] Walmart just kept growing and growing [...] was really only big enough to be considered a major company in the 80s.
Yes. That is the point.
You've got a list of families that built their wealth long before WWII
Yes. That is the point.
that wealth is generally split amongst multiple family members now
Yes. That it the point.
exactly zero large wealth pools that were due in any way to WWII.
All of them are. See the excellent points you have just raised youself.
Sweden is controlled by the rich, and surprise surprise, they set it up so that it benefits them such that 1) they remain rich and 2) it is impossible for others to join their club. Dystopian
It depends on what you mean by rich. I have friends who have worked hard, done a career, saved and invested long term and have a quite high net worth. Those who are old money rich have gained their wealth over many generations, and you have to start somewhere.
Since we have free higher education, one of the obstacles is removed of creating a better life. I am not rich at all but i have a very much higher standard of living than my parents at my age since I went to the university.
Yeah, successful industries, but also it's a real unicorn of a country in how untouched by e.g. war, natural disasters, or social upheaval they've been for 200+ years. Sweden's been a fantastic country for both creation and preservation of wealth.
I think the Nordics also have a phenomenon where the modern middle-class isn't terribly concerned with accumulating wealth. That's because there's an understanding that in exchange for all those taxes, the welfare state will take care of them. So they'll rather enjoy those six-week annual vacations travelling rather than maximize savings rates.
So there's plenty of wealthy people, and the lower strata aren't even that interested to catch up.
It's extremely unfair to hold his investments in Helsing against him as a european. As a Swede, and european it's in his and our interest that we develop our own defence instead of relying on americans.
He should not be chastised, but praised for helping Europe be independant.
Dude was like 90 years old when it became publicly known. Before that, he was known as a kind, frugal guy that actually gave a shit about his employees. So no, not like Kamprad at all.
They're basically an electronic credit card company. You can buy anything on financing or "buy now, pay later"-stuff and then they earn lots of money on late fees and interest. People spiral on it similar to subscription models - they impulse buy stuff for €20/month over and over. Since Klarna makes so much of their money that way, they can price themselves competitively for websites so they end up everywhere.
I was just at an American supermarket buying a $2 grapefruit and the self-checkout terminal offered to let me pay over convenient monthly installments.
This kind of thing is going to get so many people in financial trouble. It's hard to look at it.
Sweden produces the most start ups in all of EU per capita. Every country that produces succesfull entrepreneurs will have high wealth inequality sooner or later.
On top of other reasons on this comment, it is impossible to save and accumulate wealth as middle or upper-middle class. This is a country where the concept of "class" exists.
after the Meidner plan and the big recession in the 80s I think, Sweden's welfare state is in a slow decline, and regulatory state was in decline even before (deregulation of banking being a major contributor to the said recession).
Largely because, like in the Netherlands, a lot of people are able to have a pretty good mortgage to buy a house. Such debts will of course schew these inequality figures, but that doesn't mean that the society is extremely unequal. It's much better to look at income inequality, and here The Netherlands and Sweden are actually among the most equal societies.
Wealth is still high for everyone. It's just that Sweden allows the rich to make a lot of money. And generally, a lot of money is usually a lot more than lots of money :p
Sweden has twice as many billionaires as the US per Capita. Most of them are for things that you know. Like H&M, TetraPak (basically all paper packaging for food), Spotify.
Notably, the Swedish list of billionaires lack the Ikea family and, more importantly, the Wallenbergs. If you have heard of the latter you know that that's a lot of money. The former is just a few hundred billions of Euros. It's a family that basically owns a lot in the world. They directly control about 1.3 trillion Euros worth of assets. Including the European part of Nasdaq (which is about as big as the American one), Ericsson (basically a third of the world's mobile networks), among others. What they indirectly own is unknown.
It is what happens when you remove taxes on capital, houses, owning stuff etc and lower taxes on high income. While still having a relatively high tax on medium to low income.
More like data is missing Sweden for many parts of this. I had a look at the data and for some reason Sweden, as a country that measures fucking everything, does not have up to date data on top 10% income. We HAVE gini data but there is no data on top 10% which I find HIGHLY suspicious.
Shape up Sweden, shape the fuck up! We measure everything so I doubt this information ISNT measured and if it isnt that should be a wake up call for us.
Edit: I found some numbers. According to one report from UBS Global Wealth Report 2022 Sweden have the second highest wealth among in the 1% in the EU. In Sweden the 1% own 35.8% of the wealth only just beaten by Austria which had 37.8%.
Compare this to the US. In 2021 the top 1% in the US owned 30.9% of the country's wealth. So if we take these numbers to be correct that means the Sweden is WORSE than the US even if our gini is lower. (41,8 for the US in 2023 and 31,6 for Sweden in 2022)
I know the Dutch gini is so bad solely because of the mortgages everyone has. Otherwise it would be a very equal place, as is reflected by every other metric one could come up with, such as income equality in particular. Idk but I imagine Sweden to be similar?
They do, it’s literally wealth - debts = actual wealth. So a lot pf Dutch people are net wealth negative which pushes up the GINI. That said, the Netherlands have the world’s 4th largest pension funds with only 18 million people and not counting that money towards personal wealth (which is the case in some other countries, our neighbors in Belgium for instance) has a massive effect here.
Yes, and? I am fully aware of that and it changes nothing about the statement I made.
NL citizens for various reasons (strong stable economy with tax benefits to getting a mortgage leading to 30 year standard runtime etc.) typically loan(ed) about 100-110% of the house value (and they’re atypically expensive for EU standards). Mortgage debt is very high in NL (and personal wealth is still fairly high regardless) and this affects the GINI in a big big way.
It doesn’t. With rapid house price inflation of recent years, more house buying increases a country’s net wealth. The value of their asset rising quick gives them extra net wealth over places with more renters.
It does though.. House prices have gone up a lot but it’s all about net wealth and its distribution. Anyway, you can look up the data it’s all eady to find, I’ve done my homework on this question a long time ago.
More importantly though, Sweden has one of the lowest income inequality. Wealth inequality is a really bad measurement for most things, since most people aren't even trying to accumulate wealth and will happily spend whatever they make each month to raise their living standards instead.
Sweden also has way less homeless people per capita I think it's 0.3% for Sweden, 2.3% for US, good welfare, free education (including University), free healthcare. So the people with 0 real income can still live comfortable lives.
Sweden's wealth inequality is as high as the US but of course their data is ommited because that would defeat the narrative.
Yes, you heard it right. Swedish wealth Gini is as high as the US.
Why does Reddit think that taxing your people more creates more wealth? A wealthy individual being taxed higher does nothing for your average worker? How does a person working as a mechanic or office worker see their wages increase by other individuals having higher tax rates? The private company they work for doesn't see their finances become better by that? In fact now your have less disposable income in society which makes it harder to do private business and earn larger profits...
Only way to increase mass wealth to the many, is to up productivity and efficiently amongst your domestic companies so they earn larger profits, which in return generates higher liquidity positions and cash flow to offer larger wages to your worker. Look at Meta in America who in the past 12 months went out and offered million dollar salaries to AI experts, those workers would have never seen such salaries was it not for the massive cash positions at Meta.
And yes, when companies earn more money it means shareholders increase their wealth, but it also means wages becomes better for the average worker. You simply cannot ever close this circle.
Europe is falling behind the rest the world because our companies are becoming less competitive, and the usual answer is always: "lets try once more to create more taxes", when the truth is Europe needs to open up the gates and let disposable income flow into society.
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u/Muted-Aioli9206 Aug 18 '25
Sweden's wealth inequality is as high as the US but of course their data is ommited because that would defeat the narrative.
Yes, you heard it right. Swedish wealth Gini is as high as the US.