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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

> If your only goal is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at all costs, and as quickly as possible - Nordic countries is not the right place, IMO.

If that was the only drawback then that would be great. But there are many other problems. One is that it’s very hard to save up money and start a business or retire early. Another is that you see very little “high risk / high reward” economic activity, like really innovative companies. It’s a system that definitely has strong benefits if you live in “the mainstream of society”, but at the same time can feel like “halfway on the road to serfdom”, especially if live a bit differently and don’t really value the benefits.

Source: I’m a Swede living in Sweden since forty+ years.

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Yes, there are lots of difficulties in the Nordic countries - centralization and unemployment is a plight for lots of rural areas. Some towns are pretty much being propped up by local gov. and state employment, with very little private enterprise going on.

Hell, a lot of would-be entrepreneurs and business owners don't see the benefits / rewards of starting something for themselves, because you put in all those hours, with the possibility to come off worse than if you had just chosen a mediocre state job.

Salaries are quite compressed, which is great for equality - but not so much for motivation, if you're very ambitious.

With that said, we do live comfy lives, compared to most people around the world.

Source: Norwegian

For reference, in case someone is curious: If you look at the working-age population of Norway, approximately 1/3 are on welfare benefits, 1/3 work in the public sector and 1/3 work in the private sector.

It stands to reason that taxes have to be high.

Its actually quite amazing, given those numbers, that things actually work in Norway. From what you're describing, somehow 1/2 of the working age population is able to support the other half of the working and a sizeable non working population.

Part of the story is that the 3% annual income from the Pension Fund (oil fund) covers approximately 17% of the national budget. These numbers couldn't work otherwise.

This is, of course, thanks to the incredible lucky foresight that let us capture most of the profits from the oil industry as a public good. One could of course question the priorities in how this money is spent.

I'm of the opinion that our public sector is too big, for instance. I'm fairly sure that a considerable part of it works more as a jobs program than a necessary public utility.

Another interpretation would be that we in effect already have a massive basic income program going, a priority with which I'd actually agree. We're just not being honest about it, partly due to still being unable to run it unconditionally. The unspoken and un-debated consensus seems to be that there needs to be a bit of a taboo in utilizing such services, or the system would be overloaded.

>Another is that you see very little “high risk / high reward” economic activity, like really innovative companies

This doesn't seem to be true. Nordic countries rank very high in terms of startup ecosystems and startups per capita.

There’s a lot of startups in Sweden but they seem relatively “low risk / low reward” and less innovative compared to Silicon Valley. You definitely don’t see the really ambitious stuff, like SpaceX or OpenAI and stuff like that. I suspect that if you looked at the whole distribution it would be shifted towards “low risk / low reward”. That can be said for most of the world though, so I admit it’s not a very strong argument.

I thin kyou're looking at pretty much the wrong variables here if you want to see SpaceX and OpenAI.

Sweden is a country of 10M while USA has 330M and constant influx of brain power. Its more likely related to that than anything else.

Not to mention the couner argument that in a nordic society you are more able to live through life worry free, which according to some people is the key for innovation.

You'd expect to see at least a billion dollar exit once in a while. But this is very rare.

Kahoot is the only one I'm aware of. Most startups in Norway are sold off before they cross the $20 million mark.

Yep. And one of the sources of that influx of brain power is Sweden. There are reasons for that.

Isn’t that the case in a lot of countries, though? Even if you can make more somewhere else, you’re still likely to spend your life in the same way — ie, working “halfway on the road to serfdom”.

Definitely. It can be said for large parts of Europe. But I have a feeling it’s a bit more culturally pronounced in the Nordics... E.g. whenever parliament passes a new budget all the papers write articles with headlines like “Here Are The Winners And Losers” full of analysis of which groups will receive more/less money from the gov. Another example is that salaries of different professions are almost entirely determined by union deals, which in turn are decided by political clout. So it’s a feeling that the whole economy is “rigged”, but in a way that’s good for most people. It’s great in many ways, but I think the serfdom feeling can get more pronounced here and in most other regions.

I think you need to recheck your facts. Sweden is one of the most entrepreneurial countries in the world. It also (at some point) had more billionaires per capital than any other country (including the US). The of the likely reasons is that the consequences of failure are a lot less in Sweden compared with (say) the US.

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