I do agree with many of your points here, but just to nitpick...
> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault...9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.
So you state this as a fact about Americans in general, but then use yourself as the only proof. Isn’t 9 to 5 in the suburbs basically the end goal that most Americans dream of?
I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.
> (opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower
The idea of losing access to health care, going bankrupt and still being unable to rid oneself of crippling student loan debt sounds terrifying to me, and if I were living in the US I’d think twice about taking the sort of risks that I’d be ok with taking in a “welfare state”.
They never claimed Americans are the only ambitious people, or even the most ambitious. Just “very ambitious”, in a list of factors that (put together) allegedly combined to explain the notable outcome.
There are other countries that can’t be invaded, or speak a single language, or have a large market, or have ambitious people, or culturally permit failure without ostracizing people.
> I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.
My anecdotal experience is that the Mexicans¹ I have known have been way more entrepreneurial than the Americans. If the Spanish-speaking Americas were to establish economic union a la the E.U., I suspect that they would become the dominant economy in the world in a generation.
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1. Speaking here, specifically, of Mexicans living in Mexico and not immigrants to the U.S., although come to think of it, the immigrants are likewise also highly entrepreneurial, but this is a self-selecting segment of the population who are willing to undergo great hardship and go to a whole other country, suffer discrimination and struggle with living outside their language and culture to make a better living for themselves. Which, of course, is true of the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S. which is probably a big factor in American (U.S.) entrepreneurship.
what makes america great, is the current system or ie rule of law and institutions. those yeah are being destroyed bit by bit. by oligarchs and nefarious individuals. but in terms of laws / institutions that are not easily influenced by current politics - america is still ahead.
mexico etc the courts etc are easily corrupted. hence they can never be #1.
same for every other poor country.
the other country that I can think of with almost comparable laws to the states is the uk i.e favourable to enterprise -- but they're not doing enough to encourage labor participation
> Which, of course, is true of the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S.
Not necessarily. It's definitely a cultural thing: Latin American immigrants are far more entrepreneurial than Asian immigrants, even after correcting for wealth and education.
It's relative. There's a culture of ambition, competition, success and financial reward here in the US. Other countries have it, but in the US it's organized. It's so crazy, everything is setup to compete. The latest craziness: top universities have multiple, competing startup incubator programs - each!
LOL, Americans are definitely NOT ambitious to a fault. The vast majority believe that a 9 to 5 is a great accomplishment worthy of applause.
Have a job that affords you a roof over your head? Hero.
Have a job where you need public assistance because your employer won't pay you enough to make ends meet? Villain.
American rhetoric is ambitious. Americans in practice are just as lazy as everybody else. Americans will point to the French and claim that they're lazy and don't want to work, but would never dream of fighting for their labor rights the way the French do.
Well, that's probably because companies make so much "intellectual property" in Ireland, which they then have to pay licensing fees to their Irish subsidiaries to use.
I am being a little sarcastic. This is a description of a standard tax-avoidance scheme.
My point, ultimately, is that I suspect Ireland's numbers are inflated by its status as a tax haven for multinationals.
GDP is a complex measure as it depends on what that hour of work produces. And GDP also includes production that required no labor at all (i.e. see Ireland's incredibly high GDP per capita due to multi-nationals funneling sales through the country).
As with anything, it varies. Software engineers in China routinely put in 72 hour weeks (996), and are required to make up holidays using weekends if the holiday falls on a week day. Even “labor day” is made up on a weekend, ironically.
The workers’ rights Americans are accustomed to might be viewed as lazy or unambitious in places where working more is the norm. And across the other pond, where many Europeans have generous PTO and leave allowances, they view Americans as very hard working while some Americans might view Europeans as lazy or entitled. It’s all relative.
My personal impression (I'll admit in limited in scope) is that expectations are generally higher in the US. Not expectations around hours put in, but rather how quickly work gets done, quality of the work, etc.
And that's not just management expectations of employees, but also employees expectations of other employees.
If my coworkers in the US pulled what I saw in some parts of Asia, they'd stick out like sore thumb and be generally despised by other employees for screwing them over.
I have not worked in America, but I have worked with Americans so this is hard for me to confirm, but I simply think that weaker work-related laws simply lead to people having on average more fear of losing job and thus there's more internal/social pressure.
Anyway I did travel America though and lived 7 months in Ohio (went to OSU for exchange) and I don't know in which fields do you think where expectations are higher.
Food industry, including fast food in US, has extremely low quality/pressure and expectations. It didn't seem to me like people work harder in that field.
Building/craftsmen too I didn't see any noticeable difference at all, as most of these people are generally self-employed or in very small business anywhere in the world.
People working in shops or supermarkets, again, I haven't seen any noticeable difference.
Thus, I ask, what are those field where expectations are "generally higher"? Dystopic corporate ladder climbing?
Also, I have few colleagues that worked for Facebook, Indeed and Google (specifically Youtube) in Dublin and they recounted that it was American coworkers being consistently late, lazy, and taking every single excuse for class actions and work avoidance (such as getting PTSD or problems over any minor issue).
Also, Europe is a very huge place with different cultures.
I'm speaking of professional white collar jobs. The kind of jobs where you can work independently, nobody is really keeping track of what you're doing and it's not hard to blow off work without causing concern.
I agree that service jobs I don't see much of a difference, but I assume in those jobs you can't really slack off without it being a problem really quick.
Could you make examples? Do you think European bankers work less hard than their american counterparts? Or who does that?
European software engineers? Or is it European lawyers that do less? Or accountants?
It seems to me like you're overgeneralizing.
While I don't doubt that US can have a more competitive nature compared to many countries (in Europe we care much less about status or what other people think about our car and how big is our house, we aren't that insecure) I still think that the scenario you present is just an average where there's more incentives for great performers and low performers to perform better, but the median isn't different at all.
Bankers might not be a good example. US investment banks work their staff notoriously hard to the point of people actually dying on the job from overwork. But, I've repeatedly heard from people who have lived through it, that the work they were doing was largely wasted make-work and the whole thing had a large degree of hazing ritual about it. One guy I talked to had quit and moved to SF to try and join the tech world because he felt the work/life balance was a lot more sane there.
I think here ambition needs to be distinguished from hard-work. For example many Chinese are hardworking but not ambitious, they work very hard for many years to become a civil servant. On the other hand, many in the US believe they can achieve anything. Plus it could be those exceptionally ambitious achieve exceptionally great results, much like the top few companies pull the entire S&P 500 upwards.
Except that's just not true. The vast majority of Americans don't actually believe "they can achieve anything." The proof is that they never actually try. It's merely rhetoric that we use to punish the most vulnerable. For the vast majority, we either never reach a spot where we're comfortable because of a lack of skills or training or we get there and then lament our luck when things don't go our way with layoffs and technical obsolescence. This is of course discounting MLMs, which aren't real entrepreneurship.
Neither is part-time work. I get a 1099 NEC from a few companies each year for "consulting," which basically means I get a retainer to fix a few things that break on their servers should something go wrong. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm just getting a few extra checks.
It’s not an accident the French are able to protest for workers’ rights while Americans mostly can’t. And it’s not because of differences between French and American psychology either.
No, the reason is simple: unions. Most Americans aren’t in one, which makes collective organization nearly impossible. Businesses know this, and politicians know this, which is why some of them have made it a point to demonize and defang unions.
If it's true that unions are so valuable, why is it that in most industries in the U.S. workers are far better compensated? Take tech as one example of a non-unionized industry that has still secured for itself work-from-home, sometimes unlimited PTO, extensive maternity and paternity leave, sometimes five to six plus figures in bonus and stock compensation, etc plus pre-WFH the dankest office accomodations which regularly include catered meals, on site yoga instructors, massages, free drinks and more. Do any unionized French companies get such perks?
I suspect you will find that most workers are better compensated outside the US than in the U.S.
Tech is probably an outlier. Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S.
As far as why tech workers are better compensated in the US? Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensated even within the US. Those working in the Bay Area, Boston, NYC are far better compensated than their counterparts in say the Midwest (the pandemic may have changed things, but looking at pre-pandemic figures is useful to gain an understanding of the wage disparity). When you factor in healthcare and other social services provided in Europe, West European tech workers are not disimilarly compensated from their Midwest counterparts.
The reality is that the outliers are these handful of American tech hubs which have outsized outcomes. Which brings us to what’s probably the real reasons for the US’s high economic output.
Immigration and college education, which is what these places have in common.
>I suspect you will find that most workers are better compensated outside the US than in the U.S.
Huh? The US has the highest median disposable income in the world[0], let alone tech which blows Europe out of the water even in the lowest of cost of living states.
You're not going to find accurate income information for service workers because service workers notoriously do not report their cash tips which make up for a large portion of their income. That means the median is even higher.
> Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S.
No, they're not. The median income wouldn't be higher in the U.S. if the majority of its workers were not compensated more. In particular, with regards to commercial, full-time farming, farmers make far more in the U.S. (median commercial farm income was $186K in 2021 [1]).
Truck drivers in the U.S. earned a median income of $47K in 2019 [2] while truck drivers in France as of 2021 report around 25K EUR [3]. Many such examples.
> Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensated even within the US.
Sure, but we can compare tech hubs in France (are there any besides Paris?) to tech hubs in the U.S. or we can compare overall U.S. vs France. It doesn't matter how you slice the data: U.S. salaries come on top and by a large factor. This is also generally true across all engineering professions. As an example, take Civil Engineers (37K EUR vs $71K USD base) [4].
> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault...9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.
So you state this as a fact about Americans in general, but then use yourself as the only proof. Isn’t 9 to 5 in the suburbs basically the end goal that most Americans dream of?
I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.
> (opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower
The idea of losing access to health care, going bankrupt and still being unable to rid oneself of crippling student loan debt sounds terrifying to me, and if I were living in the US I’d think twice about taking the sort of risks that I’d be ok with taking in a “welfare state”.