In Sweden, billionaires are surprisingly popular
The land of ABBA and Ikea has high wealth inequality
AS IS PERHAPS appropriate for the country which produced the song “Money, Money, Money”, Sweden has one billionaire for every 250,000 people, one of the highest rates in the world. It is also one of the world’s most unequal countries in terms of the distribution of wealth. An estimate from The Economist finds that the value of Swedish billionaires’ fortunes is equivalent to a quarter of the country’s annual GDP. Only in tax havens such as Cyprus or Monaco, or captured economies such as Russia or Georgia, are plutocrats more dominant.
Yet among ordinary Swedes, billionaires are surprisingly popular. “Only the royal family, Astrid Lindgren, Abba and Bjorn Borg could compete in popularity,” wrote one newspaper in 2018 on the death of Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea. Talk of levying harsh taxes on the wealthy is met with a shrug. “The debate that you have in America or Britain about taxing the super-rich just doesn’t exist here,” says Janerik Larsson of Timbro, a free-market think-tank.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "In the rich man’s world"
From the November 28th 2019 edition
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