More on Sweden and the EU issue from today's Professor G newsletter: Sweden Last week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. His wealth is greater than the combined fortunes of the next three men on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos. Of the 500 people on the list, 180 are Americans or reside in the U.S. Their combined wealth is equivalent to that of the bottom 54% of U.S. households. In American politics, the interests of the few are framed in opposition to the interests of the many. We can have billionaires, we’re told, or we can have universal healthcare, but we can’t have both. That’s a false choice. Sweden (among other countries) settles the argument: Billionaires and universal healthcare can coexist. It’s not capitalism vs. socialism. Capitalism actually works better when built on a foundation of empathy and equity. Sweden is a contradiction — an F1 engine running inside a Volvo station wagon. On the one hand, Senator Bernie Sanders praises its universal healthcare system — 11% of GDP spent on healthcare, life expectancy of 82.7 years, and outcomes on par with, or better than, those of other advanced economies. On the other hand, while the EU stagnates, Sweden is projecting 2% GDP growth. A recent analysis from Boston Consulting Group found that 30% of Swedish firms ranked in the top quartile of performance for their sectors, nearly double the performance of the best-performing EU nation, the Netherlands. The report cited three drivers of Swedish exceptionalism: a culture of risk-taking encouraged by worker mobility, paired with strong unemployment benefits, sustained government investment in R&D, and deep capital markets. As the Economist wrote last year, “Stockholm is the new capital of capital.”