re: #51 Flame Fin Tomini Tang

The point is that circumstances have changed and the “Robber Baron” families as you call them are not running everything today because they were not allowed to get to that point.

I think they had more power, and actually came very close to running the show. Today’s rich are just rich. Those families actually had US troops coming to their aid and shooting striking workers. Today there are public utilities, not then. They could have shut down the entire nation if they wanted. A handful of these guys had more money than the US Treasury. Because there were no taxes back then.

Your numbers are interesting, and I think could be explained in several different ways. For instance, I’d like to see comparative patents issued between the two nations. One way of accumulating wealth in the US is to control patents. If we have more patents, then we have more small monopolies. Or, perhaps we could look at savings rates. Do the Swedes save more? Meaning they don’t spend as much. Our nation tends to spend like mad. Before the housing crash, people were pulling equity out of their houses very quickly. They were blowing their wealth. However, numbers before the housing crash should have shown that Americans, overall had more wealth per capita, as their property had more value.

I see just from Wikipedia that the entire population of Sweden is just about equal to New York City. This means that few industries are needed to employ the population, perhaps their salaries are higher.

Look through this.

You’ll see that they do indeed save more, have a more highly educated society (because of the smallness), and government programs tend to be more effective, also because of the size. For instance, New York, Boston, and Chicago have good mass transit, but overall the US does not. Their economy is also weighted towards exports, our is weighted towards imports, and they made the decision in 1973 to phase out imported oil. This was pretty wise.

All of this would explain those numbers.