1. The US is a country of migrants (ignoring the blight of slavery for now), whether those be those seeking a better life from Europe originally, later China and later still Central and South America. These are all people who uprooted whatever lives they had and legally or illegally migrated to the US. IMHO you still see echoes of this "pioneering" culture and I think it's no accident that the peak of the frontier, the Wild West, and homesteading in general have been deeply mythologized.
But look at TV shows like Gold Rush or Deadliest Catch. Whatever creative license is taken here, you still have people who will take the risk of working a dangerous and dirty job for a share of the proceeds.
The average American just seems to have more of an appetite for risk than at least anywhere I've been in Europe.
2. The much-discussed "Protestant work ethic". As exploitative as it is (and it is exploitative), the willingness of Americans to work all the time has an effect that I don't think you can dismiss.
3. Being comfortable makes you more risk-averse, even lazy. We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent. These are all good things. The upside of not having those things, if there is one, is that (IMHO) people have a greater motivation. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. It just... is.
4. 330M people most of whom speak one language (English obviously). You can't argue that this doesn't make things easier.
5. The barrier to education that is cost with a legacy admissions system led to the endowment system that created venture capital.
For the record, I'm Australian not American and the above isn't intended to extol the virtues of American culture. For example, the fact that a near-majority of the US thinks it's acceptable that a trip to the ER can bankrupt a significant portion of the population is cruel, even reprehensible.
EDIT: corrected less risk-averse to more risk-averse.
>Being comfortable makes you less risk-averse, even lazy
Do you mean more risk-averse? Anyway, to comment on this point. Non-Europeans, get quite a few things mixed up.
>We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent.
The bigger problem is two-fold and has to do with your second point:
1. Europeans have very set schedules, which has only started to erode with younger generations. Summer for vacation. Evening and weekend for relaxation. Weekdays for work. This encompasses almost every hour of a person's life, each year. If you have an idea you can execute alone and deviate from this pattern, great. If you don't and need someone else, good luck finding like-minded people, as you're already a very unique individual. If you can somehow accumulate enough wealth or get an investment, you could hire people instead. Yet, that's tough for younger people to do, and older people will slowly settle in their ways. Also, related to point 1, Europeans typically don't venture very far away from their childhood friends and family unlike Americans having no qualms uprooting their past lives.
2. Europeans don't universally have 6-8 weeks of vacation and 35 hour work weeks. Most of the younger middle class or upper middle class is likely to work 40h weeks and has 3-4 weeks of vacation, as well as some loose mandatory holidays. Loose mandatory holidays kinda suck to work with for bigger projects, at best you can weave them together with your PTO. Even working 32h weeks, which a lot of Europeans started doing, still leaves your head with the job 4 out of 7 days and mentally complex things require pretty big context shifts. The structure of this free time is more positioned as "regular bigger breaks from work" rather than "now I can take time off from my job for a long time and focus on my own stuff". Either way, nothing beats just taking a year off to work on yourself or your own ideas.
That's another way of describing conformity, in this case to cultural norms.
The best way I can describe it is like this: in the UK (and the US), the default position is that things are allowed unless they're specifically forbidden. In continental Europe, it's the reverse: everything is disallowed unless it's specifically permitted.
This was evident to me from the time that I lived in Germany and Switzerland at least.
Disruptive businesses aren't created by conformists.
I wonder about the UK. When I created my business I started by contracting and using the inevitable downtime to get my products off the ground. Thanks to IR35 I would find that very difficult now.
Then you have stuff like workplace pensions which are an administrative mine field.
> The best way I can describe it is like this: in the UK (and the US), the default position is that things are allowed unless they're specifically forbidden. In continental Europe, it's the reverse: everything is disallowed unless it's specifically permitted.
Only in rural North America, otherwise, everybody has the mentality as the Europeans. Otherwise, I wholeheartedly agree. Europeans don't know the meaning of the word "Freedom".
The only difference with the Uber and such is that people have no fear to break the Law.
The US as a country was founded on very high risk. It makes sense that this remains in the culture today.
I don't think that European policies (vacation, universal health care, etc) are the cause of Europe being more risk averse. I think it's the other way around. We have those policies because we have a more risk averse culture compared to the US.
This isn't a bad thing per se. The problem is that we live in an age where technological innovation is fueling the global economy, and there is no innovation without risk.
Speaking of work-ethic - I've noticed how much less Australians work than everyone else. Knocking off at lunchtime on a Friday, leaving at 3 or 4pm, etc. The only people I've seen working a full 40 hours in Australian companies are the people who own the company, and foreigners.
I know Australians have are able to easily get a work visa to go to America. The cultural shock must be pretty big once they're actually expected to work a full day, though I guess the salary increase makes up for it.
> Knocking off at lunchtime on a Friday, leaving at 3 or 4pm, etc. The only people I've seen working a full 40 hours in Australian companies are the people who own the company, and foreigners.
Are you implying that this is a bad thing? Having time to actually enjoy life seems to be very underappreciated here.
As an Australian, your theory is correct. The culture shock is real and has caused tensions amongst distributed trans-Pacific teams that I've been a part of.
- Australians would complain that their American counter-parts were burning themselves out and ignoring structural issues impacting their productivity. Or outright accusations of "you working harder than us makes us look bad" - classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
- Americans would complain that the Australians were lazy and not pulling their weight.
I think risk aversion is a big one, at least here in Australia. You might be seen as someone who failed rather than someone who tried and learned for next time. There is also not much VC culture so you have to convince conservative banks that your wild idea (gamble?) has merit.
Jeremy Howard (Fast AI) had a talk that hit home when discussing startups in AU vs US, why he left and why he came back:
So all the languages of EU members are officially recognized. This has become increasingly unwieldy as you need translators in the EU Parliament for every combination and there probably aren't that many people who can translate Portugese to Estonian, for example.
There have been proposals over time to instead translate into a particular language. This has been resisted heavily by the French in particular because everyone knows that intermediate language would be English.
English really is the lingua franca at this point.
Additionally the presidency of the EU rotates every 6 months (IIRC), which has created its own problems. For example, when potential new members were negotiating the then-French EU president wanted to negotiate in French but (IIRC) new members tend to default to English.
If you look at number of proficient speakers, English is by far the most spoken language followed distantly by German, French and Italian (in that order). And this is still true even after the UK has left the EU.
English, French and German are the procedural languages of the European Commission.
English has clearly won here but there is a lot of resistance to this linguistic hegemony (as many see it). The French have a ministry to find new words for things to stop English loan words seeping in. Many people in many EU member states don't want to lose their culture and language. And I can understand that.
But, going back to the original point: people need to communicate. English is the natural means for that. As a result many people spend a lot of time and effort trying to preserve the status quo. This is another facet of conformity, in this case conforming to historical traditions and languages.
People who obsess about preserving language and culture aren't the people who start massively disruptive businesses.
Consider these data points:
1. The US is a country of migrants (ignoring the blight of slavery for now), whether those be those seeking a better life from Europe originally, later China and later still Central and South America. These are all people who uprooted whatever lives they had and legally or illegally migrated to the US. IMHO you still see echoes of this "pioneering" culture and I think it's no accident that the peak of the frontier, the Wild West, and homesteading in general have been deeply mythologized.
But look at TV shows like Gold Rush or Deadliest Catch. Whatever creative license is taken here, you still have people who will take the risk of working a dangerous and dirty job for a share of the proceeds.
The average American just seems to have more of an appetite for risk than at least anywhere I've been in Europe.
2. The much-discussed "Protestant work ethic". As exploitative as it is (and it is exploitative), the willingness of Americans to work all the time has an effect that I don't think you can dismiss.
3. Being comfortable makes you more risk-averse, even lazy. We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent. These are all good things. The upside of not having those things, if there is one, is that (IMHO) people have a greater motivation. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. It just... is.
4. 330M people most of whom speak one language (English obviously). You can't argue that this doesn't make things easier.
5. The barrier to education that is cost with a legacy admissions system led to the endowment system that created venture capital.
For the record, I'm Australian not American and the above isn't intended to extol the virtues of American culture. For example, the fact that a near-majority of the US thinks it's acceptable that a trip to the ER can bankrupt a significant portion of the population is cruel, even reprehensible.
EDIT: corrected less risk-averse to more risk-averse.