Why are there so many more startups in the US compared to Europe?
While not a perfect measurement, there is more innovation and economic generation that happens in the US compared to Europe. Time will prove which culture of business wins.
As a generalization, American culture is significantly more optimistic than European culture. The fixation of the latter on risk and the former on reward reflects baseline cultural assumptions about what the future will look like. Building a high-growth startup, or investing in one, does not look like a sensible decision to a pessimist and this is reflected in attitudes and behaviors.
1. A larger, wealthier, cohesive consumer market sharing language, and culture.
2. A business-first, citizens-second approach to society.
3. Wealthier, and less risk-averse investors (ties back to point 2.).
Simply put, very different societies (even more considering Europe is not at all a homogeneous block), with different priorities, both extremely wealthy by global standards.
The question is more: which model is more sustainable as a society in the long-run, that play is still ongoing and we might not have a clear answer for the next 30-50 years.
>2. A business-first, citizens-second approach to society.
This is meaningless. Businesses are activities undertaken by people. Everything resolves back to the people -- the same aggregation of the same individual people in all cases. Reifying the abstraction of "business" to treat it like some separate entity that's at odds with the very people who are engaging in the actual activity that term describes is a monumental confusion of ideas.
Businesses are activities undertaken by people but they are also legal entities which have no need to abide by ethical or moral standards, shielding the underlying people from liabilities incurred by such entity. People can't do that.
Citizens need to abide to cultural norms, societal expectations, etc.
Of course everything resolves back to people, in a reductive sense, but those entities (citizens, and businesses) don't have the same standards: morally, ethically, nor legally. Neither do they share the same needs, businesses can by eventuality support the needs of citizens to sell stuff but their only motive is profit-motive, not what's best for citizens.
Business-first is a prerogative of how the USA approaches regulations, it's left first to businesses to regulate themselves until issues mount up to the point where regulations are needed, at that point the businesses have had time to amass power and fight against those. Even in the cases where regulation would be beneficial to society, even in cases where the current regulations which are business-friendly are damaging to society (US's healthcare is a clear example).
It's only meaningless if you don't want to see what it means, citizens needs are considered below the needs of businesses as entities, it's a cultural trait of the USA to let businesses roam more-or-less freely (again, with the exception of some industries) until they cause enough damage to generate popular calls for them to be restrained, at that point is not clear if the government will be able to reign in them. Businesses in the USA have much more power than the people, they make policies, they donate enormous amounts to political campaigns, etc. Citizens can't play in the same field.
There are many cases from the past decades: the global financial meltdown of 2008, the dysfunctional healthcare system, the opioid crisis fueled by a single pharma company, the nosedive of Boeing, etc.
You can attack my point in many ways but not by saying "it's meaningless", businesses interests are, in many cases, not citizens' interests. A very clear example: if a business could they would not hire any Americans, simply because the workforce is expensive, shipping this labour outside of American borders would be great for any business' bottomline, it would not help at all society as a whole. They would do that even if it meant killing their own businesses, since there wouldn't be consumers to buy their products, it wouldn't matter until the issue was extreme enough to require them to actually create a consumer market by employing people in the country.
> Businesses are activities undertaken by people but they are also legal entities which have no need to abide by ethical or moral standards, shielding the underlying people from liabilities incurred by such entity. People can't do that.
I don't understand the concept of assigning moral agency to a pattern of activity. The legal entity is itself just a conceptual framework under which actual people operate, and not a concrete entity capable of autonomous action.
The individuals who own and operate the business are the moral agents, and I don't see how they are shielded from the consequences of their own actions. Limited liability just creates a distinction between personal and business assets for the purpose of financial liability, and does not have anything to do with ethical or moral standards.
> their only motive is profit-motive,
"Profit" is just a quantification of net gain in subjective utility experienced by people, in whatever form that takes. Fundamentally, "profit motive" is a redundant phrase, because "profit" refers to the fulfillment of whatever motivation you had in the first place. Whether that's good or bad overall isn't a function of the pursuit of profit -- profit consists of fulfilling the pursuit of anything -- but rather what was being pursued, and what moral boundaries were crossed its pursuit.
Some people seem to bend over backwards to create conceptual frameworks aimed at externalizing the causality of human behavior. Perhaps those who want to create utopia need to find the fault in our stars, not in ourselves, in order to hold out hope that all the world's problems can be someday solved, so they blame abstractions like "capitalism" or fictional characters like the devil for the unethical behavior of human beings. But none of that is really valid -- all of the problems of society are rooted in the fallibility of human nature, and there's no way around that. Unscrupulous, ambitious people don't go away simply because you've altered the form of some abstract system -- they will find ways to benefit at the expense of others no mater what system you cook up.
This makes sense along with piva, probably because there is enough inconsistency in the familiar system as it has developed, that it's less possible all the time to make black & white judgments.
>Unscrupulous
>-- they will find ways to benefit at the expense of others no mater what system you cook up.
A more sophisticated chef with a dish completely unfamiliar but irresistible can still be disruptive. Whether or not it's a brand new concoction or a rehash of something so out-of-style that it's simply long forgotten.
While not a perfect measurement, there is more innovation and economic generation that happens in the US compared to Europe. Time will prove which culture of business wins.