Ask HN: Why does the US has a stronger culture of entrepreneurship than Europe?

My completely unfounded take: Culture.

In Europe, you have a millennia-long culture of classism, feudalism, aristocracy, guilds, etc., that's still somewhat ingrained in modern society. People are more content with being born into a certain class, not expecting or striving for upward mobility. You'll see people picking a profession after school and sticking with it until retirement, and it's out of the norm to switch or try to start a business.

Whereas in the US, a few hundred years ago settlers came in and had to start from scratch. It doesn't matter what you were in your previous life, everyone had an equal start (more or less), and they had to build whole cities from scratch.

I think this partly also explains the differences in salary between the US and Europe. There is a deeply ingrained sense of "ordinary workers shouldn't make more than $X, that doesn't make sense" creating a kind of tacit collusion between employers, which does not exist in this form in the US.

Perhaps its because of the history and culture of self determination. Dog eat dog if you prefer. No one else was going to help you, you need to help yourself. Individuals must have a job or earn money. sink or swim. Hard lessons embedded in the culture.

Individuals (generally) don't have a safety net like most European countries.

Individual health care is only for the successful (rich). This breeds a culture of perseverance, if you like it weeds out the weak & lazy. They can't survive in this sort of cultural environment, so they are able to be exploited with low wages and conditions, which in turn allows businesses to thrive.

Add to this a critical mass of people (350 million?) and you have lots of consumers with lots of money to invest/spend. Initially fortunes were made and the country grew economically on super low wages (slavery). You now have lots of "canon fodder", workers who will do what they are told and must accept wages at any level because they must to survive. Individuals must provide for their old age, no one else will. If you can't then you just keep working. The individual drive to succeed is very strong in this environment, chances must be taken, failure is not an option. The only way to pull them selves out of this situation is by innovating and entrepreneurship.

Speaking for Germany: A culture of risk-avoidance, a different attitude toward money and (by) those who have it (distrust instead of veneration), a terrible bureaucracy afflicted with paper document fetishism, significantly less venture capital per capita, lack of spaces to experiment - no "garage startups" because especially young people don't own/live in a house here, a focus on degrees, not entrepreneurial achievements.

In a word --- bureaucracy.

More specifically, the lack thereof in the USA.

All it takes to start your own legal business in the US is a few hundred dollars, an idea and the will to succeed. Even children do it on a regular basis.

Because we don't use the metric system. The metric system instills a false sense of equivalence of levels where as the imperial system makes it clear that there are hierarchies, even in nature, and it's better the higher you go. This compels the non-metric user to compete against other users as well as set the general social tone. For example, metric system users have no equivalent to expressions such as "give an inch and they'll take a mile", or "mile high club".

https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-idioms-or-sayings-based-...

Metric system also makes for lazy minds. How trivial is it to remember decimal numbers and multiply by powers of 10? A child can do it. But try to master oz and inches and feet and yard and various other body parts and how they build up to a cosmos, and now you are talking more significant brain power requirements.

In sum, to design the metric system you need a brain but to use it you don't. Conversely, to design the imperial system you just needed to count toes, but to use it you need sharper minds. This is the ultimate paradox of these two systems.

The concept/culture of failure is different I think

Because a strong culture of entrepreneurship requires an oligarchical relationship between government and business that favors the interests of capitalism over all else, and a weak social and regulatory safety net that makes it easier for businesses to exploit labor, skirt regulations and avoid taxes.

The "move fast and break things" mentality of entrepreneurship simply isn't possible under competent and effective government.