TEDx Talks
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 12 months, 2016–2023
15:42 · 2.3M views · May 2, 2016
Sociologist and comedian Harald Eia argues in a TEDxOslo talk that Nordic social democracies produce more rich people per capita than the US or UK. He credits high taxes, welfare and strong unions for creating a safety net that enables risk taking.
HN uses it as a counterintuitive data point in debates on welfare states, social mobility and entrepreneurship.
12 comments from Hacker News
It was a tidbit that I ran across in this video which had some other interesting data points as well. Such as the fact that when you look at rich people per capita, it seems that social democracies like Canada, and Scandinavia create rich people more easily than the USA does. For example if you look for people worth $30million+ per million people, Canada has 186 while the USA has 126. That's about a third more per capita. And watching the video, you find that 42% of the children of the bottom 20% in the USA wind up in the bottom 20%. Very little of Canada does anything like that poorly.
Just giving money will not work, see Saudi Arabia. They have all the money they can dream of and did not evolve. If you want it to work it needs 3 things: 1) Free Education 2) High Taxes 3) Strong Unions Sounds leftist? It may astonish you which countries have the highest ratio of rich persons per capita live. This and a good explanation can be found in "Where in the world is it easiest to get rich? (TEDxOslo)" this video Just giving money may help in short term anyway, but I doubt it is one solution for everything.
In these kinds of discussions I like to promote this interesting TEDx talk: this video "Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?" Spoiler: the talk shows that statistically the Nordic countries lead the world in millionaires and billionaires / capita, and in rags-to-riches. The talker offers the opinion that this is because its of the strong social safety net, education and healthcare. Living in Scandinavia of course I like to hear this ;)
I watched a very interesting TED talk related to this the other day. The premise is the question "Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?". The answer won't surprise you if I tell you the answer will surprise you. this video
Well, it depends. This short tedxoslo had some nice points ("Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?" Hint: not the US): this video He's talking about social mobility from 8:30