German has extremely liberal inheritance taxes. On the one hand this is often justified with the existence of the German "Mittelstand" (medium sized businesses typically owned by one family over generations), on the other this means the easiest way to get rich is to have rich parents.

Low inheritance taxes are actually a great predictor for maintaining social inequality over generations. If you wanted to reduce social inequality you'd instead want to drastically lower VAT (which disproportionately affects poorer people), adjust income taxes to lower the tax burden on lower incomes and raise it on higher incomes, and drastically raise taxes on income from capital (rather than labor). This isn't even simply an opinion, this is scientific consensus.

That reduces social inequality, but that is not the singular goal of a society. Producing goods and services and wealth for the nation is a goal that competes with “tax away almost all the gains of these activities”, which is why there’s debate about how to balance these things.

Frankly, who is "the nation" if not its people? As long as even a single individual suffers poverty, "the nation" has failed. If "the nation" is its people, protecting every single person from hardship is a higher goal than allowing a minority to live in excessive luxury.

If you think the "wealth of a nation" is measured by the luxury of a few rather than the poverty of the many, you might as well just revert to feudalism.

That OECD study is really tricky as it only goes to mean income. The interesting bit would be to really rich and there I am not sure Scandinavia would score so well.

Thank you for the chart. Germany is further down the list than even I thought, admittedly. How sad ist that. Here I thought that at least Germany having a good social safety net and free university would mean it is somewhat easy to pull yourself out of low income if you are intelligent and have the drive, as well as parents who gave you a bit of encouragement in your early years. Seems like even that is harder than I thought.

Do you have one for mean income to upper class by chance? Even +1 Std Deviation move would be significant in terms of wealth building.