While the inequality trap framework is also one of pessimism, it is not quite so hopeless. Some societies do escape high inequality, low trust, and high levels of corruption, most notably the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, and Finland). Other countries, especially the United States, fall in the middle range of inequality and trust (both decreasing over time), but have modest levels of corruption. Within the United States, the level of corruption is not uniform. Some states have relatively clean government, others are more corrupt. In this chapter, I first show, using the 1995–7 wave (wave 3) of the World Values Survey, that there is little evidence of an inequality trap in the Nordic countries.