One of the things I learned from some Norwegians on a trip to Norway:
In Norway, if a restaurant abuses its staff, it's not just the staff that will strike or sympathetic customers who will organize a boycott. It's the plumbers who won't show up to fix the sink that breaks, the carpenters who won't show up to patch up a dented door jam or install a new shelf, and the shippers who won't drive ingredients out to the restaurant anymore.
In the US, that kind of coordinated cross-discipline striking is explicitly illegal (I'd have to go look up my history to confirm, but I believe that was related to the federal intervention to stop the rail strikes because it disrupted mail delivery).
1) It makes me wonder where the surplus goes. Invested back into the corporations, so that the people who run them have a large amount of power? That would be dystopian. Unless I'm making an incorrect assumption, like...
2) Is it only downward compression, or does it perhaps act both upwardly AND downward? So there's little profit unspoken for, and anyone participating in the labor market is receiving a roughly equal piece of the economic output (or, at least, within a relatively narrow band).
3) That would suggest something rather radical to the (neo)liberal mindset of there being no ceiling on what spoils of productivity one can claw to oneself: instead, an acknowledgment that we're all roughly equal humans giving up a roughly equal portion of life, time, energy, and freedom to labor, regardless of the prerequisites to be competent at that labor (or of the opportunities to exploit one's position).
4) As for implications for other countries, I wonder if there are any for those in which social, racial, and class hierarchies are deeply embedded. Can the kind of robust wage bargaining described emerge even without all of that rectified? Maybe it's what catalyzes that rectification?
Re 2: salaries are very seldom too low. Think of waiters cleaners etc. they have pretty decent salaries. At least in Sweden where I live. This is the effect of unions being strong, a general culture that values work and workers, and historical and political context. Also scarcity plays a role, there are few people and many professions are hard to find.
Having said that, it's no socialist Heaven either, wealth inequality is among the highest in developed countries and unemployment is very high especially among the young people with immigrant background. Racism, or a certain suspicion of strangers, is latent and affects access to jobs. Inflation is high, housing market is as crazy as elsewhere, and living costs are not low.
1) In Finland most of the value is given out as dividends. We have a chronic underinvestment problem where large companies don’t have long term strategies so they dole out a comparatively large amount of value as dividends vs. re-investing the money for future profits. As a result, the stock market is skewed towards dividend-companies vs. growers.
Right, the real crisis is all those Nordics sneaking into the U.S....
It’s the hottest destination. Who would not swap six weeks paid vacation and universal healthcare for a $100,000 out-of-network ER bill and five days off a year?
I did a couple of quick searchers with help of ChatGPT, and it seems like in Norway, at least, a tenured professor would get ~$50k post-tax, a primary school teacher ~$35k, and a cleaner ~$20k. If anything, such low income inequality seems dystopian. I would expect talented and ambitious people rather move elsewhere.
Although not tenured yet, as a professor I know that not many could do the job I do, and I count myself lucky I don’t have to spend my time cleaning (or teaching in primary school for that matter). That I also get more paid than them feels like double dipping.
> A key finding is that a more equal predistribution of earnings, rather than income redistribution, is the main reason for the lower income inequality in the Nordic countries compared to the U.S. and the U.K. While the direct effects of taxes and transfers contribute to the relatively low income inequality in the Nordic countries, the key factor is that the distribution of pre-tax market income, particularly labor earnings, is much more equal in the Nordics than in the U.S. and the U.K.
Yes and this can be good or bad if you work hard and your colleagues do not. I have worked in Norway since 2017. I like it, but I do think that there are other options. Americans like to complain about everything but, at least as far as it goes on hacker news, they have way more options for high salaries than the same workers in Norway do. Of course there are exceptions but having easier access to salaries that are above 100k USD and can grow substantially from 100k USD really changes things. But on the academic side, American PhD students are treated like shit and make shit, whereas Norwegian PhD students get 50-60k salary (totally liveable in Oslo), pension, free healthcare, and likely no teaching requirements, and a lot of academic freedom.
In Norway there also is a strong emphasis on generational wealth being transferred forward. This has made the housing market in Oslo somewhat impenetrable if you didn't have a parent helping you out on your first flat when you are 20.
I'm not saying Norway is bad, I think it's a great place to live if you can accept the winter and that you will never be Norwegian. Also, you should accept that you live in a different culture and should try to figure out how best you can emulate and integrate. This is true for any immigrant situation in my opinion though. It was your choice to move to this country, why show up and think you know better?
I like having a ski mountain right next to the city and I like the university culture as it is more flat like American-style than hierarchical like European-style (I am a research scientist). That being said I lived the last two years in The Netherlands and I think it is better overall in terms of cultural acceptance of outsiders and I think I feel like I understand and, importantly, agree with the ideas of what makes the Dutch the Dutch. Who knows. I don't have all the answers, just my two cents.
Fun fact, but there's essentially zero correlation between income inequality & wealth inequality- and the Nordics have some of the highest wealth inequality in the world. For example in 2019 by Gini coefficient, the most unequal countries in the world were #1 the Netherlands, #2 Russia, #3 Sweden, and #4 the United States (with Denmark coming in at #8). The data is clearly pretty noisy, but as far as I can see Sweden was again more unequal than the US in 2021:
Meanwhile Southern Europe has reasonably high income inequality, but not much wealth inequality. Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
> Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
Ask someone from the Nordics about housing prices. Do you think they’ll change the subject?
I live in Denmark. I am Danish. Too many people nurse fantasies of the Nordics as some kind of socialist utopia.
The fact is Denmark grows more corrupt by the day. They keep pushing the retirement age so I will be working until I'm 72. Healthcare quality has been dropping for more than 40 years now. The wealthy own the majority of land. We are currently home to a government that is leading the EU in its push for a surveillance mandate that is frankly terrifying in its scope. That same government pushed through the most garbage mega-project I have personally ever witnessed—that we the taxpayers are supposed to fund—despite voter outcry. Digital tenders get sold in backroom deals to a single company that is so ethically bankrupt they've been called out numerous times for workplace violations by our unions.
We're all fucked in the global slide toward authoritarianism and the wealthy's capture of the world economy. And while they get fat supping on our labor we're at each other's throats for who can be crowned the greatest victim.
> Fun fact, but there's essentially zero correlation between income inequality & wealth inequality- and the Nordics have some of the highest wealth inequality in the world.
If there's so little correlation between income inequality and wealth inequality, why are we even supposed to care about wealth inequality? That wealth is essentially frozen in place. It's hopefully being invested in sensible ways, but no one sensible is going to spend it down anytime soon. The thing with wealth is that once you spend it, it's gone for good - so wealth accumulation, especially on any kind of multi-generational scale, tends to be associated with remarkable frugality.
One thing to note is that the idealized Sweden and many benefits remain because we had a much lower wealth inequality 30 years ago but (mainly) right-wing governments have been very "successful" at removing the barriers that kept the wealth inequality low.
- Inheritance tax was abolished in 2005
- Wealth taxation was abolished in 2007
- "income tax reduction" was initiated in 2007
Meanwhile our schools have gotten larger classes and worse results, especially the income tax reduction was insidious since it was a nationally mandated tax reduction that mainly hits the tax revenue of cities and regions (ie, political entities that had no part in the laws that lowered their tax revenue).
Basically, Sweden has been speed-running into re-making our society into a mini-US and even surpassed the US in some regards.
Sweden 2025 isn't the same as in 1985, and policies enacted around 2005 are the ones that are really starting to hit with their secondary effects today (Iirc Denmark has had fairly many right-wing governments over this period as well).
The link you shared has data from 2021, which looks completely different than what you shared - and Sweden comes at 12th, but all the other nordic countries are buried way down in the ranking. It's frankly very hard to believe that the nordic countries are more unequal than America when it comes to income, wealth, well-being or pretty much any statistic you can think of.
There is a asterisk in the table that says that the numbers are a mix between wealth inequality and income inequality. I think it makes it very volatile and hard to interpret.
There’s that study that found Italian families who were wealthy during the renaissance are still wealthy.
Sweden had a very powerful monarchy (the dominant Baltic power at one point) and an aristocracy but never a revolution. I’d expect a lot of wealth inequality based on inherited wealth.
> there's essentially zero correlation between income inequality & wealth inequality
Out of curiosity, how is this measured, and is it due to mega rich people not having taxable incomes? Do you have a source for this? Certainly there must be some correlation between making money have having it…
Income inequality is a red herring, and too often it is chanted without any thought given to what support for equality means or why inequality is ostensibly opposed. There are, of course, two classes of reasons that people have for supporting income equality.
1. opposition to income inequality per se
2. opposition to something other than income inequality, with inequality as a proxy for that thing
For (2), the person may either believe that income inequality necessarily results in the problem they're concerned about, or they may be confusing it with inequality per se.
For (1), one motivation is the classic envy of the have-nots for the haves, or a basic confusion about justice where it is misunderstood as entailing equality.
The first real problem is poverty. A double income upper middle class family with a $600k home is not equal to the millionaire or billionaire down the road in terms of income, but they are not suffering because of that inequality. Furthermore, the easiest form of equality is universal poverty, something socialist/communist regimes were quite good at arranging. Obviously, this kind of equality is undesirable.
A second problem is the influence money has in politics. This isn't the result of inequality per se, only the deranged relationship to money that people, including those in politics, have. The lust for money is the real culprit here, not money per se.
A third problem, related to the first, is one arising from ineffective markets. On the one hand, this might be the result of central planning or onerous regulation and other features of economies in collectivist societies. These can crush personal initiative and responsibility, and reduce the individual to an element of the collective, thus diminishing the dignity of the person. On the other hand, while free markets are quite good at allocating goods, they aren't infallible, and an idolatry of the market can encourage a participation in the market that flouts morality and regard for human dignity, resulting in a market that instead of contributing to the freedom and good of its participants, becomes a force for exploitation in which some enrich themselves through unjust practices. (I would also add a radical, totalizing libertarianism ideology that reduces the human person to an economic actor - full stop - and construes all human activity as economic, thus dehumanizing market participants.)
I would encourage people to read JPII's 1991 encyclical "Centesimus Annus" for a balanced summary critique of the dominant economic orders of the last century or so as a corrective for their errors.
I will generalize but by my experience most Americans I have met just can't fathom to pay (= taxed) for some common good. Why should I pay for someone's healthcare when I live healthy and all I see that others are smoking? Why should I pay for someone's free train ticket when I only travel by car? This I saw across all genders, age groups, and political affiliation. Americans have this hyper individualist mindset that no other country does in the planet. It's good for some things like innovation (see the HN crowd) but not necessarily a benefit for the society.
Taxes as various European states and US states are sometimes on par. Everyone pays for somebody’s health problems, Americans as well, through insurance, it is just health insurance is mandatory in Europe. The other stuff boils down to effective use of tax money, it is easier to do it in a smaller state compared to US or Canada or similar. Individualism has an effect but at this day and age it is about lobby groups politicising any topic they do not like. FYI nobody likes to pay taxes.
Historically these "tax for the common good" policies have only been abused. Most of us are suspicious of/frustrated with them. If you want to improve the common good kill the income tax.
I lived in Asia and the country had a very capable public healthcare system with universal coverage. Generally a very socially harmonious society that heavily balances personal status with that of society.
But cover the cost of drug for orphan diseases? "Why should my costs go up because of some child that costs half a million a year?"
Seems plausible wrt my experience, though I've only skimmed it. This is gonna be vague but hopefully interesting.
I feel like there's a traditional job market in Denmark, and then a more recent, foreign-influenced market.
Most people work in the traditional market: there's a collective bargaining agreement, and you just get whatever you get. If they really like you, they find some peanuts within the budget that you can have, but you're not going to negotiate a 40% salary bump compared to similar profiles. You're on a fixed ladder that most of the people doing your title are on. Teachers, doctors, a fair few devs who work in traditional firms. Now and again, it hits the news that some union has demanded a bit more money, and there's some back and forth in the media. But nothing changes about the system, if you work one of these jobs, you are stuck with whatever the outcome of the negotiation is.
Now, Denmark is also a modern country with a lot of highly educated, English speaking people who know what people are doing in other countries.
There's a bunch of power traders in Jutland making a ton of money. There's a bunch of startups of the SV type. There's influencers selling toothpaste and makeup. There's guys trying to build nuclear power. There's private equity and consulting. These guys tend have a different ethos when it comes to salary.
It's more correct to say that the job market is split between unionized labor and high-skilled office positions ("funktionær" = "official"), which is basically anything requiring a university education. In recent decades, the latter category has grown exponentially as industrialized economies have turned into service economies.
Collective bargaining and stepladder salaries are not really a thing for officials, and never has been (outside of a few cases in the public sector, like doctors).
It's worth noting that Norway gets nearly a tenth of its GDP from natural resources, like oil and fish, which is far more than any other country with democratically elected leadership, so how Norway's economy works is very different from how other countries ecenomies work.
The paper sites Wage compression as the primary reason for income equality. I doubt that would go over well with most of the engineers at the US tech companies.
The biggest financial problem for most economies these days are retirement obligations towards the growing share of seniors. France and The UK are flirting with the need of being bailed out by the IMF (not possible given the size). Many EU countries have pension obligations their markers are simply not big enough to feed. Similarly in the US the stock market is puny in comparison to the returns expectation of trillions by retirees. The cash held by the wealthy and those who don’t have an overinflated stock market available to them to invest their savings into gets stashed in real estate and that is an even bigger issue. All over the world, passive investment cash is taking over the real estate supply - a needed good is hoarded and supply is choked off.
In proper market economies, that scarcity should lead to more and more construction. Cities should be expanding, right? So to fix the issue, you need regulation that reduces the incentive for real-estate hoarding as an investment vehicle (maybe more serious property taxes on residential real estate that is not a primary home) and you need easier supply of new construction with more government involvement in expanding cities/towns by building infrastructure to support them.
Another issue is healthcare - 90% of your healthcare expenses are incurred the last 10 years of your life. Your two systems of choice are either universal supply of the most basic healthcare (definition of basic expands with the wealth of the country you are in), or privately funded advanced health options for those with life-threatening conditions. The US has the latter, most countries have the former. The biggest problem there is burnout and harder to scale supply of health workers relative to the ever-higher demand. The scary thing here is that governments with high retirement and healthcare debt to their seniors have an increasingly strong incentive to reduce that debt. Pandemics, wars, autocratic silencing of opposition all help with that. In the US where 401k accounts hold the retirements, the stock market will struggle to provide all the returns expected of it. In countries where government provides the pension, the squeeze is on government debt and thus even stronger when yields on that continue to rise (as they do now in Japan).
The thing that is often missed is that with high taxes and resulting high labour cost, you get high productivity. Simply because low productivity is not profitable.
This results in bad service, high quality goods and strong utilisation of capital goods.
But as others have noted the wealth disparity is increasing thanks to new policies and low interest rates leading to asset inflation.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 60.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.nber.org/papers/w33444
There is a scale factor here that is way, way different than many other countries: there are significantly fewer people.
In Norway, if a restaurant abuses its staff, it's not just the staff that will strike or sympathetic customers who will organize a boycott. It's the plumbers who won't show up to fix the sink that breaks, the carpenters who won't show up to patch up a dented door jam or install a new shelf, and the shippers who won't drive ingredients out to the restaurant anymore.
In the US, that kind of coordinated cross-discipline striking is explicitly illegal (I'd have to go look up my history to confirm, but I believe that was related to the federal intervention to stop the rail strikes because it disrupted mail delivery).
1) It makes me wonder where the surplus goes. Invested back into the corporations, so that the people who run them have a large amount of power? That would be dystopian. Unless I'm making an incorrect assumption, like...
2) Is it only downward compression, or does it perhaps act both upwardly AND downward? So there's little profit unspoken for, and anyone participating in the labor market is receiving a roughly equal piece of the economic output (or, at least, within a relatively narrow band).
3) That would suggest something rather radical to the (neo)liberal mindset of there being no ceiling on what spoils of productivity one can claw to oneself: instead, an acknowledgment that we're all roughly equal humans giving up a roughly equal portion of life, time, energy, and freedom to labor, regardless of the prerequisites to be competent at that labor (or of the opportunities to exploit one's position).
4) As for implications for other countries, I wonder if there are any for those in which social, racial, and class hierarchies are deeply embedded. Can the kind of robust wage bargaining described emerge even without all of that rectified? Maybe it's what catalyzes that rectification?
Having said that, it's no socialist Heaven either, wealth inequality is among the highest in developed countries and unemployment is very high especially among the young people with immigrant background. Racism, or a certain suspicion of strangers, is latent and affects access to jobs. Inflation is high, housing market is as crazy as elsewhere, and living costs are not low.
It’s the hottest destination. Who would not swap six weeks paid vacation and universal healthcare for a $100,000 out-of-network ER bill and five days off a year?
> A key finding is that a more equal predistribution of earnings, rather than income redistribution, is the main reason for the lower income inequality in the Nordic countries compared to the U.S. and the U.K. While the direct effects of taxes and transfers contribute to the relatively low income inequality in the Nordic countries, the key factor is that the distribution of pre-tax market income, particularly labor earnings, is much more equal in the Nordics than in the U.S. and the U.K.
Yes and this can be good or bad if you work hard and your colleagues do not. I have worked in Norway since 2017. I like it, but I do think that there are other options. Americans like to complain about everything but, at least as far as it goes on hacker news, they have way more options for high salaries than the same workers in Norway do. Of course there are exceptions but having easier access to salaries that are above 100k USD and can grow substantially from 100k USD really changes things. But on the academic side, American PhD students are treated like shit and make shit, whereas Norwegian PhD students get 50-60k salary (totally liveable in Oslo), pension, free healthcare, and likely no teaching requirements, and a lot of academic freedom.
In Norway there also is a strong emphasis on generational wealth being transferred forward. This has made the housing market in Oslo somewhat impenetrable if you didn't have a parent helping you out on your first flat when you are 20.
I'm not saying Norway is bad, I think it's a great place to live if you can accept the winter and that you will never be Norwegian. Also, you should accept that you live in a different culture and should try to figure out how best you can emulate and integrate. This is true for any immigrant situation in my opinion though. It was your choice to move to this country, why show up and think you know better?
I like having a ski mountain right next to the city and I like the university culture as it is more flat like American-style than hierarchical like European-style (I am a research scientist). That being said I lived the last two years in The Netherlands and I think it is better overall in terms of cultural acceptance of outsiders and I think I feel like I understand and, importantly, agree with the ideas of what makes the Dutch the Dutch. Who knows. I don't have all the answers, just my two cents.
You can’t really compare dollar to krone the difference of a US salary to a Norwegian salary.
I’m not sure how to explain it for those who haven’t lived in the nordics, but you don't need a high paying income to live a good life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
Meanwhile Southern Europe has reasonably high income inequality, but not much wealth inequality. Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America
https://data.worldhappiness.report/table?_gl=1*13j5g4a*_gcl_...
Ask someone from the Nordics about housing prices. Do you think they’ll change the subject?
I live in Denmark. I am Danish. Too many people nurse fantasies of the Nordics as some kind of socialist utopia.
The fact is Denmark grows more corrupt by the day. They keep pushing the retirement age so I will be working until I'm 72. Healthcare quality has been dropping for more than 40 years now. The wealthy own the majority of land. We are currently home to a government that is leading the EU in its push for a surveillance mandate that is frankly terrifying in its scope. That same government pushed through the most garbage mega-project I have personally ever witnessed—that we the taxpayers are supposed to fund—despite voter outcry. Digital tenders get sold in backroom deals to a single company that is so ethically bankrupt they've been called out numerous times for workplace violations by our unions.
We're all fucked in the global slide toward authoritarianism and the wealthy's capture of the world economy. And while they get fat supping on our labor we're at each other's throats for who can be crowned the greatest victim.
If there's so little correlation between income inequality and wealth inequality, why are we even supposed to care about wealth inequality? That wealth is essentially frozen in place. It's hopefully being invested in sensible ways, but no one sensible is going to spend it down anytime soon. The thing with wealth is that once you spend it, it's gone for good - so wealth accumulation, especially on any kind of multi-generational scale, tends to be associated with remarkable frugality.
Precisely, it's a nonsense metric that doesn't anything about poverty at all which is something that truly matters.
- Inheritance tax was abolished in 2005 - Wealth taxation was abolished in 2007 - "income tax reduction" was initiated in 2007
Meanwhile our schools have gotten larger classes and worse results, especially the income tax reduction was insidious since it was a nationally mandated tax reduction that mainly hits the tax revenue of cities and regions (ie, political entities that had no part in the laws that lowered their tax revenue).
Basically, Sweden has been speed-running into re-making our society into a mini-US and even surpassed the US in some regards.
Sweden 2025 isn't the same as in 1985, and policies enacted around 2005 are the ones that are really starting to hit with their secondary effects today (Iirc Denmark has had fairly many right-wing governments over this period as well).
Sweden had a very powerful monarchy (the dominant Baltic power at one point) and an aristocracy but never a revolution. I’d expect a lot of wealth inequality based on inherited wealth.
Out of curiosity, how is this measured, and is it due to mega rich people not having taxable incomes? Do you have a source for this? Certainly there must be some correlation between making money have having it…
1. opposition to income inequality per se
2. opposition to something other than income inequality, with inequality as a proxy for that thing
For (2), the person may either believe that income inequality necessarily results in the problem they're concerned about, or they may be confusing it with inequality per se.
For (1), one motivation is the classic envy of the have-nots for the haves, or a basic confusion about justice where it is misunderstood as entailing equality.
The first real problem is poverty. A double income upper middle class family with a $600k home is not equal to the millionaire or billionaire down the road in terms of income, but they are not suffering because of that inequality. Furthermore, the easiest form of equality is universal poverty, something socialist/communist regimes were quite good at arranging. Obviously, this kind of equality is undesirable.
A second problem is the influence money has in politics. This isn't the result of inequality per se, only the deranged relationship to money that people, including those in politics, have. The lust for money is the real culprit here, not money per se.
A third problem, related to the first, is one arising from ineffective markets. On the one hand, this might be the result of central planning or onerous regulation and other features of economies in collectivist societies. These can crush personal initiative and responsibility, and reduce the individual to an element of the collective, thus diminishing the dignity of the person. On the other hand, while free markets are quite good at allocating goods, they aren't infallible, and an idolatry of the market can encourage a participation in the market that flouts morality and regard for human dignity, resulting in a market that instead of contributing to the freedom and good of its participants, becomes a force for exploitation in which some enrich themselves through unjust practices. (I would also add a radical, totalizing libertarianism ideology that reduces the human person to an economic actor - full stop - and construes all human activity as economic, thus dehumanizing market participants.)
I would encourage people to read JPII's 1991 encyclical "Centesimus Annus" for a balanced summary critique of the dominant economic orders of the last century or so as a corrective for their errors.
[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
How about the view that inequality is fundamentally unfair and unjust because
(1) It is unfair and unjust if some have more goods than others due to factors that they are not fundamentally responsible for
(2) If determinism is true then no one is fundamentally responsible for anything
(3) Determinism is true
I lived in Asia and the country had a very capable public healthcare system with universal coverage. Generally a very socially harmonious society that heavily balances personal status with that of society.
But cover the cost of drug for orphan diseases? "Why should my costs go up because of some child that costs half a million a year?"
It was quite shocking.
Come to Poland. This kind of egoism becomes more and more rampant.
I feel like there's a traditional job market in Denmark, and then a more recent, foreign-influenced market.
Most people work in the traditional market: there's a collective bargaining agreement, and you just get whatever you get. If they really like you, they find some peanuts within the budget that you can have, but you're not going to negotiate a 40% salary bump compared to similar profiles. You're on a fixed ladder that most of the people doing your title are on. Teachers, doctors, a fair few devs who work in traditional firms. Now and again, it hits the news that some union has demanded a bit more money, and there's some back and forth in the media. But nothing changes about the system, if you work one of these jobs, you are stuck with whatever the outcome of the negotiation is.
Now, Denmark is also a modern country with a lot of highly educated, English speaking people who know what people are doing in other countries.
There's a bunch of power traders in Jutland making a ton of money. There's a bunch of startups of the SV type. There's influencers selling toothpaste and makeup. There's guys trying to build nuclear power. There's private equity and consulting. These guys tend have a different ethos when it comes to salary.
Collective bargaining and stepladder salaries are not really a thing for officials, and never has been (outside of a few cases in the public sector, like doctors).
In proper market economies, that scarcity should lead to more and more construction. Cities should be expanding, right? So to fix the issue, you need regulation that reduces the incentive for real-estate hoarding as an investment vehicle (maybe more serious property taxes on residential real estate that is not a primary home) and you need easier supply of new construction with more government involvement in expanding cities/towns by building infrastructure to support them.
Another issue is healthcare - 90% of your healthcare expenses are incurred the last 10 years of your life. Your two systems of choice are either universal supply of the most basic healthcare (definition of basic expands with the wealth of the country you are in), or privately funded advanced health options for those with life-threatening conditions. The US has the latter, most countries have the former. The biggest problem there is burnout and harder to scale supply of health workers relative to the ever-higher demand. The scary thing here is that governments with high retirement and healthcare debt to their seniors have an increasingly strong incentive to reduce that debt. Pandemics, wars, autocratic silencing of opposition all help with that. In the US where 401k accounts hold the retirements, the stock market will struggle to provide all the returns expected of it. In countries where government provides the pension, the squeeze is on government debt and thus even stronger when yields on that continue to rise (as they do now in Japan).
This results in bad service, high quality goods and strong utilisation of capital goods.
But as others have noted the wealth disparity is increasing thanks to new policies and low interest rates leading to asset inflation.