We pay $100 per month for daycare which is open 6:30 to 18:30 if we need it for that long.
School costs us nothing out of pocket.
Our grand total out of pocket medical costs for our kid thus far (turns 4 in March) is around $500. Including any medication we've ever bought for him. Half of that $500 went to spending Monday through Friday at the hospital when he was born, in a hotel style room with three meals a day included for the both of us.
We didn't need private health insurance for that, nor have it provided by either employer.
We also received 480 paid parental leave days to be split between us (90 reserved for her, 90 for me, the remaining 300 at our discretion).
That's some evidence right there. I have no numbers from the countries you mentioned though. The difference there could be smaller.
Yes, we are able to buy real estate in a decent location. We live not far outside Stockholm where prices are really high compared to the rest of the country, and we had no problems buying our house.
My salary is ~twice the median income for this area, and by any measure we're at the upper end of middle class by Swedish standards.
I make $42K in Sweden (not in IT), and it's comfortably high middle class. My wife doesn't even work full time and it's still enough for us to live comfortably within our means (own a house, two cars, one kid, etc.)
If I'd been making $60K my wife could stop working. At $80K she wouldn't have to work and we'd still be moving into "new BMW every three years" kind of money.
$80K goes a lot further in Europe than it does in the US.
Or people who have let's say an ebook reader, a phone, a laptop, and maybe a desktop that they want to share books between and don't want to eat up multiple GB of storage on each device by duplicating their library everywhere.
I agree with you. Automate some task? Scrape some web content? Glue some programs together by translating the output of one to fit the input of the other?
Python it is! If it doesn't already have something in the standard library for your task, it's definitely in the PyPI. This reduces your work to importing a library and writing 5-20 lines of code.
His dental is completely free until he turns 23. Same as for anyone living in Sweden.