Sweden's City Missions
Christmas darkness in a divided Sweden
Andreas Cervenka
Reporter and economic commentator
This is a commentary text. Analysis and positions are those of the writer.
Updated 08.36 | Published 2025-12-18 21.34
A twelve-year-old is suspected of murder, aid organizations are warning of record-breaking aid needs and a new report testifies to rampant wealth gaps.
Welcome to the Swedish model.
What is really going on? Many are probably wondering this week. The news that a twelve-year-old boy in Malmö is suspected of murdering a 21-year-old is shaking an entire nation. Or should be. Perhaps the harsh truth is that we have become dull.
How are we to understand such bottomless darkness?
Former criminal investigator Luay Mohageb has spoken in interviews about meeting a 16-year-old eloquent boy who came from a working-class home, and who would later turn out to have been involved in a horrific double murder. In frustration, Mohageb asks the most pertinent question: “Please, tell me what the hell is happening to your generation?”
He gets a surprisingly honest answer. The boy explains that young people his age are "brainwashed by money" and that in order to be able to buy designer clothes and thus status, they are prepared to do anything.
Billionaires brainwash children
Who is responsible for the brainwashing? To begin with, a number of dollar billionaires who own platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat and TikTok where unfiltered messages are spread that often revolve around money, luxury, success and gangster culture. All distributed with the help of manipulative and powerful algorithms that outsmart a child's brain a hundred times out of a hundred.
But the money craze has not arisen out of thin air. Never has there been so much wealth in the world and in Sweden and never has the gap been greater between those who have and those who have not.
The Institute for Business Research IFN has produced a report, not yet published, the contents of which were presented in SVT's Ekonomibyrån. It shows that Sweden has become a paradise for the super-rich. The number of billionaires increased from 52 in 2000 to 523 in 2020 (the figure does not include rich Swedes living abroad, which would make it even higher).
Relative inequality, measured as the so-called Gini coefficient, has fallen slightly during the period, but only due to forced savings in the form of pension funds. According to the latest edition of another survey, the Global Wealth Report, the figure given for Sweden (0.75) would still place Sweden as the sixth most unequal country in the world after Brazil, Russia and South Africa, among others.
Sinking deeper into the debt swamp
The difference between the bottom and the top has increased, the richest 0.1 percent's share of the wealth has grown while the bottom 20 percent has sunk deeper into the debt swamp in twenty years. The middle class, expressed as the median, has become richer and increased its wealth from just over 300,000 kronor in 2000 to just over a million in 2020. At the same time, the richest one percent in Sweden has increased its average wealth from around 23 million to 65 million. The gap to the median has thus increased dramatically, from 89 average annual salaries to 137.
But the wealth of the middle class consists almost exclusively of housing, which for many is associated with large loans. Rarely have so many "wealthy" felt so poor as during the inflation and interest rate crisis of recent years. And rising property values are for young people the same thing as barbed wire fences around the dream of owning their own home.
If you do a little math on the numbers, it becomes clear that the richest thousand Swedes in 2020 were together worth 3,800 billion kronor, or just over 70 percent of GDP.
More families with children in crisis
Through extremely low interest rates throughout the 2010s that drove up the value of assets, and reduced and abolished capital taxes, there has been an enormous redistribution of wealth in Sweden. When this is brought up, the winners usually talk about how the most important thing is to "lift the bottom" rather than bickering about taxes.
That lift seems to be going well. Sweden's City Missions reported this week that the number of families with children in need of help is at a record high. Other aid organizations such as the Salvation Army are witnessing the same trend. According to statistics from Statistics Sweden, almost 7 percent of the population or just under 700,000 people live in social and material poverty, which is defined as not being able to afford the bare necessities, a doubling between 2021 and 2024.
According to Save the Children, 276,000 children live in financial vulnerability, where a new way of counting that better reflects cost increases has caused the figure to increase sharply. A report from the Fiscal Policy Council last year found that income gaps have also increased in Sweden and that inequality poses societal risks.
Gap and crime
“When you look at the academic literature, there is a lot about the role of money in politics and connections between crime and social differences,” said Council Chairman Lars Heikensten when the analysis was presented.
In a report from the Police, the National Board of Health and Welfare and the State Institutions Board, it was already possible to read the following two years ago: “Children and young people may voluntarily seek out the criminal activities of groups in search of, among other things, money and status and in the absence of other perceived paths to success.”
Is there any connection between the Sweden of the divides and the new raw crime? It is impossible to say for sure.
But only those who have been thoroughly brainwashed avoid asking the question.
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