The example bracket was a little on the low end, and the USD/SEK rate is quite high currently so the numbers are a little skewed at the moment.
The taxes are quite high (25-35% income tax for the ranges we are discussing) and the salaries are relatively low, yes. You don't go working in Sweden to get rich, period.
It should be noted that the swedish salary includes 5 (mandatory) or 6 (commonly negotiated) weeks of paid vacation, and often comes with no expectation to work more than 40h/week. This is a cultural difference that weighs heavily in favour of the lower swedish salary. Still, the swedish tech salaries are very low compared to the US. There are other reasons:
One reason the salary structure in sweden is quite flat is likely that higher education is free and grants/subsidies/loans to studens are decent. This means that getting higher education is very low risk (so in itself doesn't motivate a large reward).
Simply put: your salary in sweden is what you need to live. You don't save to afford a long unpaid holiday, you don't save (a lot) for retirement, you don't save money in case you get sick, you don't save towards you childrens education and so on and so forth.
A salary number on its own doesn't say much, though. What are the living costs like? In other words, where does the 12k put you compared to the median income? What percentile?
I don't know the percentile where I am. The basic wage is 4716 pesos/month. That's 336 dollars at black market rate and 551 at the fictitious. With the basic wage you are poor, you can't rent, you can't buy food, you can't pay anything. I make 928 dollars month, and with this you can't buy a home, car, etc etc
It's unfortunate salaries are so low, if they were even in the ballpark of Bay Area salaries I would have already moved. I had a great offer in many ways in Stockholm, but it's hard to justify an $80k+ pay cut.
To be honest, 50k USD/year strikes me as low for two reasons:
1. I always assumed Sweden would have quite high taxes (indeed according to Wikipedia it seems higher than the US).
2. Stockholm sounds like an expensive place to live in, just because it's a major European capital and those are rarely cheap.