The data I gave is adjusted for cost of living. (Fun fact: adjusting for cost of living hurts Sweden, living there is more expensive, not less.) This blog post describes the methodology:
As you can clearly see from the graph linked to in my previous comment, the bottom 15% or so of Swedish Americans are slightly poorer than Swedes. The top 85% or so are richer. That's the effect of inequality.
As for quality of life/satisfaction - I'll focus on wealth since I don't really know what you mean when you say "quality of life" or "satisfaction" (they are fairly subjective terms).
Thanks for linking to the post with the methodology, it was interesting. It does show the difficulty of trying to get accurate numbers, although the author has clearly made an effort to.
Re: the effect of inequality: sure, that's the effect on income. But that is obviously not all that matters.
Yes, the things I am referring to are subjective. Yes, they are hard to measure. But this doesn't mean we should just ignore them, and focus on what we can easily measure. Sounds like a recipe for optimising the wrong thing.
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/income-distributio...
As you can clearly see from the graph linked to in my previous comment, the bottom 15% or so of Swedish Americans are slightly poorer than Swedes. The top 85% or so are richer. That's the effect of inequality.
As for quality of life/satisfaction - I'll focus on wealth since I don't really know what you mean when you say "quality of life" or "satisfaction" (they are fairly subjective terms).