Read the entire post, but Felix understands something that many commentators do not:

In countries like Sweden, indeed, the social safety net is strong enough that you don’t need to build wealth in the same way you do if you’re Chinese, say. Wealth is a form of insurance, and when insurance is nationalized, you need less wealth. As a result, people can enjoy the fruits of their money, instead of saving it up for emergencies or for retirement — and only a small percentage of the population really spends a lot of effort in a successful attempt at accumulating more.
Indeed, Sweden and the US are even closer together, in terms of wealth inequality, than the charts above suggest: as Gimein notes, the Swedish data exclude money held offshore, the value of family owned firms, and the considerable wealth of super-rich Swedes like Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, who left the country to avoid taxes.

Suffice it to say, there is plenty of disagreement regarding whether or not wealth-building is good and worthwhile for reasons beyonds its insurance role. I’d suggest that wealth-building has a number of knock-on effects, and so the role of wealth-as-insurance can serve a constructive role, provided we don’t go to a Chinese consumption-dampening extreme.

Felix’s post reminded me of David Alexander’s essay on small-government egalitarianism in Australia which I still need to write about at appropriate length:

Recent research at the University of Melbourne has revealed the way that inequality measurements to date attribute an artificially low income equality to Australia deriving from its very high level of home ownership and an artificially high income equality to European countries associated with low homeownership.
In short, the low levels of home ownership in European countries necessitate high levels of government payments to low income retirees to pay for housing, and these higher payments tally into a reduced measure of income inequality; by contrast, in high proportion home-owning countries like Australia, a large proportion of low-income retirees live rent-free in existing homes, but the lower government payments translate into a higher reading of inequality. Correcting for this methodological flaw, according to researchers at the university, gives Australia a significantly higher level of measured income equality versus European countries. [Emphasis added.]

Sweden actually has a relatively high homeownership rate, hovering around 60 percent vs. a level just below 70 percent in Australia, but this struck me as an interesting wrinkle.