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Where in the world is it easiest to get rich? | Harald Eia | TEDxOslo

Where in the world is it easiest to get rich? | Harald Eia | TEDxOslo

TEDx Talks
5 HN recommenders · discussed 2016–2023
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About this video

Sociologist and comedian Harald Eia argues in a TEDxOslo talk that Nordic social democracies produce more rich people per capita than the US or UK. He credits high taxes, welfare and strong unions for creating a safety net that enables risk taking.

Why it appears in the archive

HN uses it as a counterintuitive data point in debates on welfare states, social mobility and entrepreneurship.

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

okket · 2016-05 · rec

Just giving money will not work, see Saudi Arabia. They have all the money they can dream of and did not evolve. If you want it to work it needs 3 things: 1) Free Education 2) High Taxes 3) Strong Unions Sounds leftist? It may astonish you which countries have the highest ratio of rich persons per capita live. This and a good explanation can be found in "Where in the world is it easiest to get rich? (TEDxOslo)" [VIDEO] Just giving money may help in short term anyway, but I doubt it is one solution for everything.

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btilly · 2017-06 · rec

It was a tidbit that I ran across in [VIDEO] which had some other interesting data points as well. Such as the fact that when you look at rich people per capita, it seems that social democracies like Canada, and Scandinavia create rich people more easily than the USA does. For example if you look for people worth $30million+ per million people, Canada has 186 while the USA has 126. That's about a third more per capita. And watching the video, you find that 42% of the children of the bottom 20% in the USA wind up in the bottom 20%. Very little of Canada does anything like that poorly.

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willvarfar · 2018-04 · rec

Here is an interesting related tedx talk about the proportion of rich people in Nordic socialist countries [VIDEO]

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willvarfar · 2018-05 · rec

In these kinds of discussions I like to promote this interesting TEDx talk: [VIDEO] "Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?" Spoiler: the talk shows that statistically the Nordic countries lead the world in millionaires and billionaires / capita, and in rags-to-riches. The talker offers the opinion that this is because its of the strong social safety net, education and healthcare. Living in Scandinavia of course I like to hear this ;)

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StavrosK · 2019-05 · rec

I watched a very interesting TED talk related to this the other day. The premise is the question "Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?". The answer won't surprise you if I tell you the answer will surprise you. [VIDEO]

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karencarits · 2021-06 · rec

Well, it depends. This short tedxoslo had some nice points ("Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?" Hint: not the US): [VIDEO] He's talking about social mobility from 8:30

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fergie · 2017-07 · reference

No. Norway has extremely high salaries, and income tax that is pretty much equivalent to California (about 1/3 of your gross salary after deductions), in fact Norway is one of the easiest countries to become rich: [VIDEO] You could argue that radical financial transparency is what causes this.

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mockingbirdy · 2018-07 · reference

> what about sharing it among the people who didn't have the same luck than you? That's one big thing what taxes are for: To redistribute wealth. And I have employees which earn good money. I don't know what you expect from me. > Some people can afford to take risks and earn even more while some simply cannot. That's why a solid social system is so important. It gives us the room to take risks because we can be sure that we can get food, shelter and healthcare. See [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]

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