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Comment by hultner | Hacker News Reader

Same in Sweden, about 10k pre tax to take home 5k. I looked up median salaries for CEOs in Sweden last year which was $7600 pre-tax where only service and the industrial sector is over that, industrial is the highest with $9150 pre-tax, that is at the CEO level, putting your take home salary with tax bracket 34 at about 5k/month, so it's probably a bit high for a high level executive at a mid-sized company.

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Where is the incentive then? The difference in skill, responsibility, stress, workplace demands, etc between a cashier and a CEO are nuts. How do people do that for a few grand every month?

The incentive is in living in a country where you have 0 bills to pay when you get cancer. Where homeless people always have a place to sleep, where you generally will get help when you need it and where you can finish university debt free (and your children as well). Both the cashier and the CEO wouldn't be happy in each others jobs anyway. In such a country you don't need as much as in the US for the same standard of living as well. That said, CEOs of large companies also make millions here in the Netherlands (think dutch companies as Unilever, DSM, Philips).

Well I can't speak for everyone but as a small business owner in a highly specialised business with global public companies as customers, I could financially take out more than twice that as pre-tax salary from my company but my takehome would only increase with about $3k so I hardly see any point in taking out more salary. The salary I actually take out is much closer to that of the cashier and I skipped even taking out any salary for Q1 and most of Q2 of this year since I didn't really need the money. I'd much rather reinvest the money into my company so I can expand and employ more people. I also have a goal of providing a better workplace in general, for instance I'd really like to offer 30 hour work weeks and two months paid time off per year, it's not something I can afford at this point in time but I certainly think it would be possible in the future. From my point of view it's more important to be able to build a sustainable business which can offer jobs that provide a high quality of life as well as both professional and personal fulfillment for all employees. And I do think that capitalism is the only way to produce enough quality throughput to achieve that.

Thanks for doing this. I think that what is practiced in the US a lot is the fast food of capitalism. Utterly unhealthy and aimed at short term satisfaction. As the differences between rich and poor grown they will find themselves in society that's not fun to live in anymore. Capitalism is a thing of beauty but it is sick when money buys political power, risky shuffling with money make you more than producing something of value and young people enter the job market with a debt that will take decades to repay.

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