If having a fall back plan is what drives entrepreneurship, you’d expect the firm safety net countries in the EU to have far more of it than a country like the US.
Yet we don’t.
Yet we don’t.
Several European countries have as many or more entrepreneurs than the US. It's just that in Europe it's small self-owned/family businesses, not Facebooks and Theranoses.
"In 2016, about 5.6 million small business employers and 24.8 million non-employers were counted in the United States"
compared to:
"There were estimated to be approximately 24.5 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union in 2017, with the vast majority of these enterprises micro-sized firms which only employed fewer than nine people. A further 1.42 million enterprises were small firms with between 10 and 49 employees and 231 thousand were medium-sized firms that had 50 to 249 employers."
https://eig.org/dynamism (great report)
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/the_entrepreneurship_...
For example, if Google buys 20 start-ups, they are no longer counted as small businesses.
Wealthy families in the US provide a far greater safety net than the legal minimum one faces in European countries.
Less taxes, much more business friendly legislation (contracts, labour) and tolerance towards failure = less individual safety but much more dynamics = lower absolute numbers of entrepreneurs but much higher scale aka mega corps.
Add the fact we're living in the time of technology with close to 0 marginal cost of information flows and the power law (80/20) kicks in with full force, allowing digital companies of larger scale to significantly grow further.
Compared to Europe, the US perfected that principle.