Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jenkinsj | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jenkinsj

American attitude???

Andy Grove: Hungarian

Nikola Tesla: Serbian

Sergey Brin: Russian

Patrick and John Collison: Irish

Mathilde Collin: French

Jerry Yang: Taiwanese

View on HN

America attracts innovators. They do it in America because they can’t do it at home. Whether it’s true or not, for immigrants, there’s a sense that upward mobility is possible in America.

There was an old episode of Top Gear where Clarkson was driving around an exotic car in America. He noted that Americans were super excited about the car, giving him complements, posing for pictures, saying that one day they’ll own one and generally being positive and optimistic.

In contrast, he reflected that if he did the same thing in the UK, he’d either get insulted for “showing off” or people would be generally negative/pessimistic because they could never afford one.

That's incredibly depressing to me. If he really talked to a representative cross-section of America, almost all of those optimistic people will never be wealthy enough to afford the car. At least the Brits know where they stand. We're never going to be able to effectively address wealth inequality if every person on the street believes that they're going to be a multimillionaire some day.

You're missing the point.

Americans believe we can and that belief allows the mental and emotional energy to try

No one is guaranteed success. But if you never believe you even could you would be much less inclined to even try.

I'm sorry, but I would call that false hope.

And arguably they came to America where their attitude could flourish. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist elsewhere but it’s not encouraged elsewhere.

Can you follow up with how many of those people spent 90% or more of their successful business days in their country of origin vs How many emigrated to America? Because foreign nationals needing America as a catalyst still makes it a U.S. built business.

Thats very American. Americans don't differentiate between immigrates that move to the US and people born here. An ambitious immigrant is more "American" than an unambitious natural born "American"

And yet none of them returned to their ‘country’

Reply on news.ycombinator.com