Hacker News Reader

Comment by theredbox | Hacker News Reader

Sweden’s too egalitarian society with a lot of people not being economically active. You are subsidizing unwilling and lazy with insane taxes and you get nothing in return because of equality. You are probably well off compared to them but still cant afford an apartment.

View on HN

This path of discussion is always fun to watch when it comes up.

Does it work better in America with the lazy people, are they working better just because they make less money? Most people in Sweden can actually live on one job even if it is as a cleaner.

The people that you call lazy is a very small percentage of the population. And just about all of them has some physical or psycical problem preventing them from getting a job. It is not a choice they have to either go work or starve. Noone chooses to starve just because it's fun. This mentality is very upsetting for us that has seen reality and does not live in a glass house.

Nordic countries are maybe the best place on earth if you’re not gifted in any way (academically, dexterity for manual labor etc.) and thus you work as a cleaner or other unskilled labor. For software engineers, on the other hand, there are better options.

Nonsense as Sweden has more per capita billionaires than US and more unicorn startups per capita than most US cities

Talk about arbitrary numbers you used.

These directly refute the claim that Sweden is only a good place for people who lack talent

Most billionaires inherit their wealth?

As for startups, it would be better to see the success ratio (how many people tried to create a startup vs how many succeed) and not just the number of survivors.

We are discussing the claim that talented people can’t succeed in Sweden. Yet, higher per capita number of unicorns in Sweden than in many other places, including US, shows that this claim is false

> We are discussing the claim that talented people can’t succeed in Sweden.

Who made this claim? Certainly not me. I claimed that, for an ordinary software engineer (i.e. not a startup founder), life will be better/easier in many other European countries.

> higher per capita number of unicorns in Sweden than in many other places, including US You can only come to that conclusion by diluting what a "unicorn" means.

Statistics about billionairies or unicorn startup owners are not related to the way a middle class workers (say, software engineers) live.

> Sweden’s too egalitarian society

Any examples of societies that are unequal[1] enough for you?

[1] Not sure about a proper antonym here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com