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Sorry but the evidence doesn't stand up to this AT ALL. Americans are much, MUCH more entrepreneurial than anyone in Europe. I'm American, I live in Europe, I

Sorry but the evidence doesn't stand up to this AT ALL. Americans are much, MUCH more entrepreneurial than anyone in Europe. I'm American, I live in Europe, I know this very, very well. (Yes, anecdotally speaking, of course!) Americans simply embrace risk, and embrace potential failure, far better than anyone else in the world, taken as a whole. Europeans meanwhile are a more gloomy bunch, more risk-averse, and far less likely to strike out on their own. Notable slight exceptions being the Dutch to some degree. America is so far from a "welfare state" - it is about as far away as you can get. America is a "if you're going to fall, you are going to fall all the way down, and no one is going to save you, no matter what". And somehow, a huge part of the world's entrepreneurs and innovation come from there. I don't know why. And don't take me as some kind of patriotic jingoist champion of the US of A - I am just about as far as you can get from the "Yeah Murica" kind of ultra patriots - heck, I live in Europe because I prefer the slower pace, the old world, the semblance of an actual culture, the environment that has not eaten itself from capitalism taken to the extreme. Nice linkbait headline though. :)

noir-york 12y ago
"Europe"? Which Europe? The Anglo-Saxon UK? The Germanic DACH region? The Nordics? The Mediterranean? All these are "Europe" - but in terms of culture, finance, social welfare, educational systems and much else beside they are very different.
- nakedrobot2 12y ago
  All of it. Some more than others, but no one in europe comes close to the entrepreneurial energy of the USA.
  - mauricemir 12y ago
    Oh and this leads to such a diverse and competitive market in telecoms NOT!
  - pyre 12y ago
    > entrepreneurial energy of the USA So I can go anywhere in the USA and find the exact same amount of entrepreneurial energy as everywhere else? Good to know.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    French don't even have a word for 'enrepreneur.'
    - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/entrepreneur#French https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/entrepreneur#French Where did you think "entrepreneur" came from?
      - Chinjut 12y ago
        I'm quite positive this was a deliberate joke by GFK_of_xmaspast...
        TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
        Poe's law strikes again...
        GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
        Indeed. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/bush.asp http://www.snopes.com/quotes/bush.asp
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
vasilipupkin 12y ago
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-were-the-most-entrepreneurial-country-in-the-world-not-so-fast/263102/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-we...
dd36 12y ago
The question is if that entrepreneurial spirit is a result of the welfare state or something else. If it's something else (cultural), we may not be maximizing our entrepreneurial abilities. Risk taking should be encouraged.
api 12y ago
No they aren't -- not nationwide. Americans in most of the country are no more entrepreneurial than Europeans. Americans in a few cities and regions are very entrepreneurial. These are not necessarily the cities and regions with the lowest taxes, most "business friendly" policies, or anything else that right wingers would consider likely to produce entrepreneurship. California is incredibly entrepreneurial, but it never shows up on those top ten lists of most business friendly states. I think that strongly argues for this being cultural.
- brador 12y ago
  The more entrepreneurial Americans are those from wealthy backgrounds, well networked backgrounds, or desperate circumstances. Notice, all three of the above do not require a state sponsored safety net, and it is that need for a safety net against destitution that creates an entrepreneurial mindset. Without that safety net you don't get many risk takers.
  - noir-york 12y ago
    Exactly
  - api 12y ago
    You can certainly botch entrepreneurship with business-unfriendly policies, but they are not the ones right wingers always harp on about. High-ish taxes are okay as long as they are not punitively high. Regulations are okay as long as they are easy to follow and simple to understand, and as long as they aren't over the top ideologically-driven stop-everything sorts of things. Keep fear mongers, authoritarians, and ideologues away from the regulatory pen. Complexity is death. Regulations that categorically stop you from acting are death. Things that encumber agility are death. Anything that saps your time is death, since time is often worth more than money. As a founder I'd rather pay more in taxes on profit as long as the government stays the F out of the way of my time and my executive decisions. The ideal setup for maximum entrepreneurship would probably be some kind of libertarian socialism: moderate and moderately progressive taxation, health coverage, guaranteed minimum income or negative income tax, and a simple regulatory structure that makes it easy to form new ventures, hire and fire, etc. Other than that the governments gets out of the way and lets people try new things. One caveat on progressive income taxes: they should not be too progressive and there probably should be lower taxes on capital gains. Investing in long-sighted things should be a form of tax shelter. That's a good thing. The best would probably be a progressive tax curve but where the curve doesn't start to increase until you get really, really up there. Another rationale here is diminishing marginal utility of money-- eventually you get to the point where more money does not materially alter your circumstance in any perceptible way. That's the point at which taxation should become more progressive. At that point you are as rich -- as subjectively experienced -- as a human being can possibly be, and the rest is "savings beyond planned investment" as Keynes would say.
orf 12y ago
I see a lot of patriotism in this comment but almost no facts. > And somehow, a huge part of the world's entrepreneurs and innovation come from there I would say that's for historic reasons and the egregious amount of money you possess as a country rather than some in built ability to take risks?
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > I would say that's for historic reasons and the egregious amount of money you possess as a country rather than some in built ability to take risks? Indeed. The US is very young, and throughout history, we had many temporary centers of innovation - from various parts of Europe to Middle East to deep Asia to Africa.
- timepiece 12y ago
  The Petrodollar standard set by Nixon helps for sure.
bullfightonmars 12y ago
Whose evidence? According to this list[1] with data from the World Bank, Netherlands is 35th has 45.05 small businesses per 1000 people. Do you have a stationary shop on your corner or in your neighborhood? I certainly had access to many small businesses in Rotterdam, that would have folded 25 years again the States, replaced by mega corps and big box retailers. The United States on the other hand is 69th on the list with 19.98 small businesses per 1000 people [1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micro/Small-and-medium-enterprises/Number/Per-capita http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micro...
- vasilipupkin 12y ago
  in all fairness, comparing numbers of micro businesses across countries is tricky. differences in tax laws can create incentives to register as a micro business vs some other way, but not much of a measure of large scale entrepreneurship. But, either way, little evidence that US is more entrepreneurial
- SilasX 12y ago
  It doesn't seem helpful to equate small businesses and startups. Usually meme about "entrepreneurs being good for the economy" is referring to the latter, who fundamentally change how it works, finding numerous non-obvious efficiency improvements, rather than giving slightly cheaper picture framing. On that metric, is Europe still ahead of the US?
- wsc981 12y ago
  I guess small businesses include the so-called ZZP-er (freelancer), for many jobs paid pretty crappy. In the Netherlands, especially for low income jobs like packet delivery, many Dutch companies hire ZZP-ers these days, since it's easier to get rid off. It's really hard and expensive in The Netherlands to get rid of bad performing employees with a permanent contract, especially compared to the USA. Because of this reason many companies prefer to hire ZZP-ers currently. From recent statistics I understand we have approximately 800.000 ZZP-ers in the Netherlands or 1 per every 21 citizens.
dangerlibrary 12y ago
Care to criticize the referenced research rather than jump to conclusions from anecdotes? There's a link to the PDF right there in the article. http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/Gareth_Olds/assets/olds_food_stamps.pdf http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/Gareth_Olds/assets/olds_f...
technotony 12y ago
I think even in the best case scenario Welfare State is only going to be one small factor in the rate of entrepreneurship, so Americans can easily be more entrepreneurial than Europeans despite the lack of welfare state. Culture, education, role models etc are all also going to be important. I think this data shows increasing welfare in America could increase entrepreneurship even more.
a_c_s 12y ago
We're discussing an article based on multiple research studies by somebody at the Harvard Business School. Rebuttals should be based on more than vague anecdotes.
higherpurpose 12y ago
For this reason I think such a study should be focused on Europe and compare the countries there with each other, to see if this theory is a good one or not. I don't think it makes much sense to compare it to US, because there are other factors contributing greatly to the success of US entrepreneurs and it has nothing to do with "being more risk-averse or not". It has to do with the fact that the US is actually a huge single market. EU really isn't right now. It's not easy to just launch a company in a country and easily have success in another. Certainly nowhere as easy as it is to launch an online business in one state in US and have success in other states. There are other factors, such as concentrating many entrepreneurs in one place, which also leads to a concentration of investors in one place (talking about Silicon Valley here). There's also a huge concentration of media in the US that is followed by other countries as well. How many European media sites or blogs do you know? I bet you can count them on one hand. It's much harder for a company in Europe to get promoted across all European countries, let alone to have Americans hear about it. I'm sure there are many other factors as well that make the US a much easier startup environment than Europe.
namlem 12y ago
Keep in mind that some cities/states have much more generous social safety nets than others. Utah, is perhaps a bad example due to the confound of Mormon culture, but it has a good safety net and tons of entrepreneurs.
timepiece 12y ago
I can attest to that. I am not American and I believe that one of the bright spots in America is the entrepreneurial spirit of its people in general. People in America love taking risk and pushing the envelope experimenting with new stuff and technologies and that's one of the major strengths of this nation but I wouldn't go too far to express something like this far better than anyone else in the world. That's just absurd patriotism and there's no doubt about it.
tessierashpool 12y ago
The Internet exists because of massive and very long-term spending on scientific research. This was a massively successful public works program, which led to a colossal boom in entrepreneurship. Likewise, I'm no fan of the Department of Defense in this country (the US), but the research they're currently funding in robotics has similar potential. "Americans embrace risk," as you say, partly because our government creates incredible opportunities through public research which can easily be transformed into private profit. Also, the article repeatedly demonstrated that Americans embrace risk more when they have a social safety net. You can't hand-wave away research with a generalization, especially not when the research you're hand-waving away has gone into great depth examining the detailed workings of the underlying truth which made your generalization possible in the first place.
- dataker 12y ago
  One certainly cannot axiomatically assert the internet wouldn't be here without the U.S government. Although it has definitely helped, the community programmers and engineers were the `fathers of the internet`. If the government hadn't invested, there would certainly be analogous technologies and initiatives built on top of scientific developments. It's just too hard to say how it'd be like
  - api 12y ago
    Without the government it would be a hodgepodge of walled gardens based on different protocols and standards with everyone trying to make a 'platform play' to lock it down... exactly like what you see today with OSes. You'd also have complicated fee structures with every little service charged differently since telcos would want to charge a la carte for access to individual protocols and endpoints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gauge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gauge
tjradcliffe 12y ago
There are at least two ways of looking at this: one is to compare countries, the other to compare what the same individual would do in different countries. There are quite a few non-Americans working in the American technology sector. I've worked on teams with 30% American content, the rest coming from around the world. Talking to those people, it's clear that they are taking advantage of the best of both worlds: the large capital accumulations that are available for investment in the US, but with the backup plan of going back home to a sensible social welfare structure if things don't work out. I've been in the same boat: a Canadian who has lived and worked in both the US and Canada. I've taken risks--particularly as a husband and father--that my American colleagues could only take because they were childless and had spouses who worked. Knowing that no matter what happened, my kids would have access to a health-care system that produces significantly better outcomes at significantly lower cost to the public purse than the American mess, was without question an enabler for me. I was very conscious of this in making business decisions, including the decision to go into business (while broke and unemployed in the wake of the dot-com crash, as it happens.) Had I been in the US at the time I would have been scrambling to find a job so my kids would be covered by decent health insurance. Maybe my case is atypical, but some kind of comparison between foreigners living/have lived in the US vs natives might shed some light on this question.
techpeace 12y ago
Citation needed.
vinceguidry 12y ago
> America is a "if you're going to fall, you are going to fall all the way down, and no one is going to save you, no matter what". And somehow, a huge part of the world's entrepreneurs and innovation come from there. I don't know why. It's not that bad. People do look out for each other. They try to save each other from themselves. America is risky in that if you don't take steps to protect yourself from the broader market, eventually that exposure will over time erode your social position. There are ways to protect yourself, most of them involve mobility. You get out of crappy markets, crappy jobs, crappy situations. You move towards hot spots, hot markets, hot ideas. So long as you keep moving with capital and wealth, that wealth will protect you because America is a place where there's always a shortage of good people available to do things. If you don't want to be mobile, then you have to make up for that with planning. There are retirement vehicles that take time and skill and planning to execute on. Insurance products that take the sting out of all kinds of horrible risk. Health plans that will give you a baseline of care that you can then start planning your own health on. To gain access to this world you need a certain amount of means, but you can generally trade time for capital. For example, you can shop around for insurance, health plans, and such. You can usually find something that will work at a very basic level that's relatively affordable. There's always someone out there that's recognized the market segment you are searching in and has a service tailored for you. America's social services are also typically pretty good. It's certainly a point of contention, but people aren't starving, your dignity will take a hit if you end up homeless but Americans are compassionate enough so that, for instance, homeless people in San Francisco can find someone to loan them their garage. We don't like to see people suffer, and there are numerous church groups, social services, even the cops will take pity on you if they see you're really struggling. America really takes its economy seriously, and everybody's expected to contribute to it, so we will not respect someone if they choose not to participate, but we won't let them starve, either. People who stay on the streets long-term are generally people who simply cannot contribute for whatever reason. Plenty of people become homeless for economic reasons, but the economy is fluid enough that they'll find a berth eventually, if they want one.
javert 12y ago
> I live in Europe because I prefer the slower pace, the old world, the semblance of an actual culture, the environment that has not eaten itself from capitalism taken to the extreme. Well, you can thank American capitalism and ingenuity for that even existing, given WWI and WWII and the Cold War.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
vilmosi 12y ago
You are spot on when it comes to the difference in cultures. But Europe has little bearing to the argument as the question was more about US welfare. And don't pretend you don't know why entrepreneurs come to the US... we all know why, that's where the money is. Investors and consumers with spending money. It's as simple as that.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>Sorry but the evidence doesn't stand up to this AT ALL. >NO STATISTICS AT ALL >Nice linkbait headline though. :) Nice complete lack of statistical evidence, though.

noir-york 12y ago

"Europe"? Which Europe? The Anglo-Saxon UK? The Germanic DACH region? The Nordics? The Mediterranean? All these are "Europe" - but in terms of culture, finance, social welfare, educational systems and much else beside they are very different.

nakedrobot2 12y ago
All of it. Some more than others, but no one in europe comes close to the entrepreneurial energy of the USA.
- mauricemir 12y ago
  Oh and this leads to such a diverse and competitive market in telecoms NOT!
- pyre 12y ago
  > entrepreneurial energy of the USA So I can go anywhere in the USA and find the exact same amount of entrepreneurial energy as everywhere else? Good to know.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  French don't even have a word for 'enrepreneur.'
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/entrepreneur#French https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/entrepreneur#French Where did you think "entrepreneur" came from?
    - Chinjut 12y ago
      I'm quite positive this was a deliberate joke by GFK_of_xmaspast...
      - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
        Poe's law strikes again...
        GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
        Indeed. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/bush.asp http://www.snopes.com/quotes/bush.asp
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

vasilipupkin 12y ago

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-were-the-most-entrepreneurial-country-in-the-world-not-so-fast/263102/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-we...

dd36 12y ago

The question is if that entrepreneurial spirit is a result of the welfare state or something else. If it's something else (cultural), we may not be maximizing our entrepreneurial abilities. Risk taking should be encouraged.

api 12y ago

No they aren't -- not nationwide. Americans in most of the country are no more entrepreneurial than Europeans. Americans in a few cities and regions are very entrepreneurial. These are not necessarily the cities and regions with the lowest taxes, most "business friendly" policies, or anything else that right wingers would consider likely to produce entrepreneurship. California is incredibly entrepreneurial, but it never shows up on those top ten lists of most business friendly states. I think that strongly argues for this being cultural.

brador 12y ago
The more entrepreneurial Americans are those from wealthy backgrounds, well networked backgrounds, or desperate circumstances. Notice, all three of the above do not require a state sponsored safety net, and it is that need for a safety net against destitution that creates an entrepreneurial mindset. Without that safety net you don't get many risk takers.
- noir-york 12y ago
  Exactly
- api 12y ago
  You can certainly botch entrepreneurship with business-unfriendly policies, but they are not the ones right wingers always harp on about. High-ish taxes are okay as long as they are not punitively high. Regulations are okay as long as they are easy to follow and simple to understand, and as long as they aren't over the top ideologically-driven stop-everything sorts of things. Keep fear mongers, authoritarians, and ideologues away from the regulatory pen. Complexity is death. Regulations that categorically stop you from acting are death. Things that encumber agility are death. Anything that saps your time is death, since time is often worth more than money. As a founder I'd rather pay more in taxes on profit as long as the government stays the F out of the way of my time and my executive decisions. The ideal setup for maximum entrepreneurship would probably be some kind of libertarian socialism: moderate and moderately progressive taxation, health coverage, guaranteed minimum income or negative income tax, and a simple regulatory structure that makes it easy to form new ventures, hire and fire, etc. Other than that the governments gets out of the way and lets people try new things. One caveat on progressive income taxes: they should not be too progressive and there probably should be lower taxes on capital gains. Investing in long-sighted things should be a form of tax shelter. That's a good thing. The best would probably be a progressive tax curve but where the curve doesn't start to increase until you get really, really up there. Another rationale here is diminishing marginal utility of money-- eventually you get to the point where more money does not materially alter your circumstance in any perceptible way. That's the point at which taxation should become more progressive. At that point you are as rich -- as subjectively experienced -- as a human being can possibly be, and the rest is "savings beyond planned investment" as Keynes would say.

orf 12y ago

I see a lot of patriotism in this comment but almost no facts. > And somehow, a huge part of the world's entrepreneurs and innovation come from there I would say that's for historic reasons and the egregious amount of money you possess as a country rather than some in built ability to take risks?

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> I would say that's for historic reasons and the egregious amount of money you possess as a country rather than some in built ability to take risks? Indeed. The US is very young, and throughout history, we had many temporary centers of innovation - from various parts of Europe to Middle East to deep Asia to Africa.
timepiece 12y ago
The Petrodollar standard set by Nixon helps for sure.

bullfightonmars 12y ago

Whose evidence? According to this list[1] with data from the World Bank, Netherlands is 35th has 45.05 small businesses per 1000 people. Do you have a stationary shop on your corner or in your neighborhood? I certainly had access to many small businesses in Rotterdam, that would have folded 25 years again the States, replaced by mega corps and big box retailers. The United States on the other hand is 69th on the list with 19.98 small businesses per 1000 people [1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micro/Small-and-medium-enterprises/Number/Per-capita http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micro...

vasilipupkin 12y ago
in all fairness, comparing numbers of micro businesses across countries is tricky. differences in tax laws can create incentives to register as a micro business vs some other way, but not much of a measure of large scale entrepreneurship. But, either way, little evidence that US is more entrepreneurial
SilasX 12y ago
It doesn't seem helpful to equate small businesses and startups. Usually meme about "entrepreneurs being good for the economy" is referring to the latter, who fundamentally change how it works, finding numerous non-obvious efficiency improvements, rather than giving slightly cheaper picture framing. On that metric, is Europe still ahead of the US?
wsc981 12y ago
I guess small businesses include the so-called ZZP-er (freelancer), for many jobs paid pretty crappy. In the Netherlands, especially for low income jobs like packet delivery, many Dutch companies hire ZZP-ers these days, since it's easier to get rid off. It's really hard and expensive in The Netherlands to get rid of bad performing employees with a permanent contract, especially compared to the USA. Because of this reason many companies prefer to hire ZZP-ers currently. From recent statistics I understand we have approximately 800.000 ZZP-ers in the Netherlands or 1 per every 21 citizens.

dangerlibrary 12y ago

Care to criticize the referenced research rather than jump to conclusions from anecdotes? There's a link to the PDF right there in the article. http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/Gareth_Olds/assets/olds_food_stamps.pdf http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/Gareth_Olds/assets/olds_f...

technotony 12y ago

I think even in the best case scenario Welfare State is only going to be one small factor in the rate of entrepreneurship, so Americans can easily be more entrepreneurial than Europeans despite the lack of welfare state. Culture, education, role models etc are all also going to be important. I think this data shows increasing welfare in America could increase entrepreneurship even more.

a_c_s 12y ago

We're discussing an article based on multiple research studies by somebody at the Harvard Business School. Rebuttals should be based on more than vague anecdotes.

higherpurpose 12y ago

For this reason I think such a study should be focused on Europe and compare the countries there with each other, to see if this theory is a good one or not. I don't think it makes much sense to compare it to US, because there are other factors contributing greatly to the success of US entrepreneurs and it has nothing to do with "being more risk-averse or not". It has to do with the fact that the US is actually a huge single market. EU really isn't right now. It's not easy to just launch a company in a country and easily have success in another. Certainly nowhere as easy as it is to launch an online business in one state in US and have success in other states. There are other factors, such as concentrating many entrepreneurs in one place, which also leads to a concentration of investors in one place (talking about Silicon Valley here). There's also a huge concentration of media in the US that is followed by other countries as well. How many European media sites or blogs do you know? I bet you can count them on one hand. It's much harder for a company in Europe to get promoted across all European countries, let alone to have Americans hear about it. I'm sure there are many other factors as well that make the US a much easier startup environment than Europe.

namlem 12y ago

Keep in mind that some cities/states have much more generous social safety nets than others. Utah, is perhaps a bad example due to the confound of Mormon culture, but it has a good safety net and tons of entrepreneurs.

timepiece 12y ago

I can attest to that. I am not American and I believe that one of the bright spots in America is the entrepreneurial spirit of its people in general. People in America love taking risk and pushing the envelope experimenting with new stuff and technologies and that's one of the major strengths of this nation but I wouldn't go too far to express something like this far better than anyone else in the world. That's just absurd patriotism and there's no doubt about it.

tessierashpool 12y ago

The Internet exists because of massive and very long-term spending on scientific research. This was a massively successful public works program, which led to a colossal boom in entrepreneurship. Likewise, I'm no fan of the Department of Defense in this country (the US), but the research they're currently funding in robotics has similar potential. "Americans embrace risk," as you say, partly because our government creates incredible opportunities through public research which can easily be transformed into private profit. Also, the article repeatedly demonstrated that Americans embrace risk more when they have a social safety net. You can't hand-wave away research with a generalization, especially not when the research you're hand-waving away has gone into great depth examining the detailed workings of the underlying truth which made your generalization possible in the first place.

dataker 12y ago
One certainly cannot axiomatically assert the internet wouldn't be here without the U.S government. Although it has definitely helped, the community programmers and engineers were the `fathers of the internet`. If the government hadn't invested, there would certainly be analogous technologies and initiatives built on top of scientific developments. It's just too hard to say how it'd be like
- api 12y ago
  Without the government it would be a hodgepodge of walled gardens based on different protocols and standards with everyone trying to make a 'platform play' to lock it down... exactly like what you see today with OSes. You'd also have complicated fee structures with every little service charged differently since telcos would want to charge a la carte for access to individual protocols and endpoints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gauge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gauge

tjradcliffe 12y ago

There are at least two ways of looking at this: one is to compare countries, the other to compare what the same individual would do in different countries. There are quite a few non-Americans working in the American technology sector. I've worked on teams with 30% American content, the rest coming from around the world. Talking to those people, it's clear that they are taking advantage of the best of both worlds: the large capital accumulations that are available for investment in the US, but with the backup plan of going back home to a sensible social welfare structure if things don't work out. I've been in the same boat: a Canadian who has lived and worked in both the US and Canada. I've taken risks--particularly as a husband and father--that my American colleagues could only take because they were childless and had spouses who worked. Knowing that no matter what happened, my kids would have access to a health-care system that produces significantly better outcomes at significantly lower cost to the public purse than the American mess, was without question an enabler for me. I was very conscious of this in making business decisions, including the decision to go into business (while broke and unemployed in the wake of the dot-com crash, as it happens.) Had I been in the US at the time I would have been scrambling to find a job so my kids would be covered by decent health insurance. Maybe my case is atypical, but some kind of comparison between foreigners living/have lived in the US vs natives might shed some light on this question.

techpeace 12y ago

Citation needed.

vinceguidry 12y ago

> America is a "if you're going to fall, you are going to fall all the way down, and no one is going to save you, no matter what". And somehow, a huge part of the world's entrepreneurs and innovation come from there. I don't know why. It's not that bad. People do look out for each other. They try to save each other from themselves. America is risky in that if you don't take steps to protect yourself from the broader market, eventually that exposure will over time erode your social position. There are ways to protect yourself, most of them involve mobility. You get out of crappy markets, crappy jobs, crappy situations. You move towards hot spots, hot markets, hot ideas. So long as you keep moving with capital and wealth, that wealth will protect you because America is a place where there's always a shortage of good people available to do things. If you don't want to be mobile, then you have to make up for that with planning. There are retirement vehicles that take time and skill and planning to execute on. Insurance products that take the sting out of all kinds of horrible risk. Health plans that will give you a baseline of care that you can then start planning your own health on. To gain access to this world you need a certain amount of means, but you can generally trade time for capital. For example, you can shop around for insurance, health plans, and such. You can usually find something that will work at a very basic level that's relatively affordable. There's always someone out there that's recognized the market segment you are searching in and has a service tailored for you. America's social services are also typically pretty good. It's certainly a point of contention, but people aren't starving, your dignity will take a hit if you end up homeless but Americans are compassionate enough so that, for instance, homeless people in San Francisco can find someone to loan them their garage. We don't like to see people suffer, and there are numerous church groups, social services, even the cops will take pity on you if they see you're really struggling. America really takes its economy seriously, and everybody's expected to contribute to it, so we will not respect someone if they choose not to participate, but we won't let them starve, either. People who stay on the streets long-term are generally people who simply cannot contribute for whatever reason. Plenty of people become homeless for economic reasons, but the economy is fluid enough that they'll find a berth eventually, if they want one.

javert 12y ago

> I live in Europe because I prefer the slower pace, the old world, the semblance of an actual culture, the environment that has not eaten itself from capitalism taken to the extreme. Well, you can thank American capitalism and ingenuity for that even existing, given WWI and WWII and the Cold War.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

vilmosi 12y ago

You are spot on when it comes to the difference in cultures. But Europe has little bearing to the argument as the question was more about US welfare. And don't pretend you don't know why entrepreneurs come to the US... we all know why, that's where the money is. Investors and consumers with spending money. It's as simple as that.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

>Sorry but the evidence doesn't stand up to this AT ALL. >NO STATISTICS AT ALL >Nice linkbait headline though. :) Nice complete lack of statistical evidence, though.