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There are so many wrong things here that I don't even know where to start.
The climate is milder than much of the north of the US, but Boston and the PNW are not exactly unpopular.
Lower tax than most other places in Western Europe, surprisingly.
...also comparing unfavourably to much of the rest of Europe. The medical system is every bit as much of a wreck as the British NHS, and unemployment insurance is anemic and opt-in.
Consensus among foreigners (spent several years working there) was that Swedish women are very mediocre, and it's actually the men who tend to be much more attractive than those elsewhere. That meshes well with the preexisting native culture warring about Swedish men taking Thai wives.
This seems to be based on the human intellectual arrogance based view that got thoroughly demolished in the last few years. The best estimate to make now is that research/writing/office work/management/anything white-collar are the prime targets for automation, and food delivery, meat processing and Uber are going to be the last human holdouts because meat has a competitive advantage at navigating the mess that is the 3D world. We got AI solving big open problems in maths before we got self-driving cars that can cope with a Swedish city (as opposed to a handful of American easy-mode desert town street grids).
Sweden is cold. Anywhere that has boilers in houses is cold. Winters with average temperatures around freezing are cold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue
Sweden is 10th in the world in tax revenue as % of GDP, behind the UK, Norway and Denmark. Sweden is high tax!
Swedish welfare spending is indeed lower than much of Europe. However it is still gigantic compared to the welfare spending in third world countries.
Consider also the beauty of Swedish women to say, Guatemalans. Or Bangladeshi women. Or Tanzanian women.
I think you're looking at Sweden from an insanely skewed perspective.
There are robots doing food delivery in Moscow right now. Furthermore, raising the price of these roles by restricting immigration accelerates automation.
Are AI/robotics companies going to try and disrupt an $8 per hour labour meat-processing industry or focus more on the $50-60+ software industry? Price signals guide automation, alongside the actual structural difficulties of course. Cutting up meat is really not that hard but we've adopted this insane economic system where cheap, low-productivity labour is subsidized by the taxpayer in pensions, progressive taxation, social services.
Quibble, but the World Bank figures on the left-hand-side of that table are worthless, because they exclude state and local taxes, and taxes labelled as "social security contributions" or similar. Using the more accurate UN figures on the right-hand-side (which still look too low when eyeballed), Sweden is 4th, and the UK at 20th is in the middle of the pack of first-world countries. The Nordic countries and France have very high taxes, even by Euroleftie standards. I'm not sure what is going on with New Zealand.
The UK shows up as very high tax on the World Bank table because essentially 100% of our taxes are collected by central government.
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Yes, pains me to say this but in 2 years time a qualified plumber may well be worth more to countries for immigration purposes than a senior staff level engineer at Google.
Honestly meat processing needs to be paid much much more than it is at the moment. It's a very "dirty" job that still requires a decent amount of knowledge and skill (do you know your beef cuts? I don't know my beef cuts...) and the people doing it and suffering aren't any less human than middle manager Becky in HR with her mediorce degree and unmemorable experience managing a team of 4 people.
If this means Becky from HR gets to eat steak at a restaurant less often then so be it.
From my memories of paying to get deer processed(granted, it's been a few years, I've DIY'd 100% since the pandemic), labor in the packing plant is a relatively minor contribution- I remember it still being a third to half of the price as buying beef in the grocery store.
Not saying raising meatpacking wages won't raise prices. But probably less than you'd think- the price of the animal dominates the price of the meat in the store, not the price of the labor to process it(further evidence- the cheapest meat comes from chickens, then pigs, then cows. For economy of scale reasons, you should expect labor to be lowest per unit of meat on a cow and highest on a chicken).
Chickens a lot less skill and effort involved in butchering, though? Far more whole chickens get sold then whole cows
Turkeys are easier than deer, but on an effort per unit of meat basis I tend to get a much better return from deer. Not a perfect analogy for chicken/beef, but it does point to economy of scale being a bigger deal than effort per animal. The parolees at the kill side of the slaughterhouse can probably produce more pounds of beef per hour, even if it comes from fewer animals.
FWIW my experience of at-home butchery is that pigs give the most meat poundage per hour invested, then lambs/sheep, then deer, then pigeons, then fowl. No doubt that the slaughterhouse has some technology and automation to make this less stark, but I'd still expect economy of scale to wash it out.
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