I'm not sure that's true. Sweden regularly feature quite far up on these "highest engineering salaries" lists [0]. I think Swedes have adopted sort of a strange outlook these days. Maybe because of avoiding the financial crisis, or at least thinking they did. People attend university for 5+ years, vacation three times a year, get into huge debt 'buying' an apartment or summer home, get a large brand name car and go on long parental leave. Preferably before hitting 30. The result being that private debt is larger than ever and the government has been selling assets like never before to keep the people happy. All great things of course, but unlikely to make one rich (at least by working).

There's no problem getting rich by working in Sweden if you keep your costs in check (which is hard to do these days), don't over educate yourself (also hard with high youth unemployment) and eschew some of the social benefits by working in less comfortable conditions (which is becoming the default anyways).

Doesn't mean you'll be super rich just by working of course, but that's not really true anywhere. At least not if your family isn't already. If it's really a priority one could of course leverage the competitiveness of most Swedes education, attitude and knowledge of languages by going to Zurich, London or (a large city in) the US for a few years.

[0] e.g. https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-...