[capisce]

> This isn't the conclusion I was most hoping to reach before moving here; there's a world in which a robust safety net, paid for by such taxes, actually incentivizes entrepreneurship by cushioning the fall - but I just don't see the evidence for us living in that world, at least not here.

This seems to be the case in Sweden. Very high taxes, but a robust safety net, and a very high startup activity per capita: https://www.business-sweden.com/about-us/media/press-release...

So I'm not sure it's the taxation structures that are mainly to blame.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Well Sweden and Finland's GDP per capita are currently within only a few thousand dollars of one another, with Sweden slightly taking the lead. I found that out just now, actually, and find it mildly surprising, I thought Sweden was further ahead. So I would first claim that as grounds to say Sweden is mostly suffering under the same yoke. They would probably become a richer nation faster by cutting back on the taxes, same as Finland. In fact the fact that the GDPs are so unexpectedly close makes me more convinced their mostly similar taxation structures are to blame, not less.

That being said: You are right, it's interesting that the combined worth of all Swedish startups appears to be very roughly 2-3x that of the combined population-scaled worth of all Finnish startups. What's the deal?

A Gini coefficient comparison shows a mild but not overwhelming difference. Sweden's currently hovers around 0.30, while Finland is at 0.285. (The US Gini coefficient is a whopping 0.48 or so for scale.)

I guess the only thing I could point to as a casual mechanism is that Sweden did in fact start quietly neoliberalizing out of some of its more distortionary taxes in the 1980s, in a way Finland hasn't seemed to yet. Sweden has abolished both its inheritance taxes and its gift taxes, for example, whereas Finland retains both (details vary a lot but you can ballpark 10-15% for both of them for ordinary folks). Maybe that has a disproportionate effect on the kinds of people who want to try their luck getting uber wealthy, so they can pass something down to their kids? I don't know, seems like it doesn't explain enough of the gulf. Maybe you can explain the $4k or so of extra GDP per capita through a confirmation of higher Gini, less tax distortion in certain areas, and being closer to the continental mainland. But that's a small enough difference that you could also feasibly call it due to the random walk of history. Both of these things are mysterious to me.