This seems backwards to me. A society with higher taxes typically has better social safety nets, better infrastructure, less corruption, etc. Higher-tax societies incentivize risk-taking, not the other way around, especially for "ambitious individuals". When there is more structure and support around, more people are able to take a leap.
If you are running business, your loses are opportunity costs. Eg. you have already 100k EUR yearly salary and you decide to try running startup. If it fails after 5 years, so you didn't get any money from it (eg. you had to paid debts at the end), you probably lost 500k EUR in opportunity cost.
Progressive taxes incentivize risk taking in lower and lower-middle class, because you are protected from "total failure", but disincentivize risk taking for upper-middle and upper class, because expected rate of return is lower.
At the end of the day, there is no single "right way" to run a state. You have to make tradeoffs, decide what you value more and what you value less.
https://ceoworld.biz/2021/01/03/worlds-most-entrepreneurial-...
If you’re financially independent or wealthy enough to be (independently) doing a startup or taking on a business venture, it’s a rounding error in the books.
And billionaires are much more scarce outside of US (and those who exist have better chances investing in other fields).
That's why SV salaries for developers are so crazy.
Your point still stands though.
Whereas in Europe everything pretty much works as it should, so why rock the boat??
The GDP of Germany and France are both below where they were in 1995 inflation adjusted (and that was true even before Covid hit). Britain's economy is where it was in 1998. Italy is far below where it was 30 years ago ($2.1t today; $1.32t in 1992, which is $2.58t inflation adjusted). Spain is where it was in 1992. Russia's economy hasn't expanded in 13 years; the Netherlands is in the same boat as Russia, no expansion since 2007-2008. Belgium's economy hasn't moved since 1995. Sweden's economy has grown by about 10% in nearly 30 years (not per year, total; $284b in 1992, which is $564b inflation adjusted; their present GDP is $625b). Austria has similarly seen economic stagnation for nearly a generation. Finland was at $141b in 1990 ($303b adjusted), they're at $300b now. And so on.
If Europe weren't disastrously broken, they wouldn't be suffering such intense and widespread economic stagnation. How long can that stagnation continue before something very bad happens (eg the social safety nets start to melt, as costs climb with demographic aging and there's no economic growth to offset it; growth doesn't get easier as the worker demographics erode)?
While Europe has been asleep for 30 years, China went and became a superpower with an economy larger than the whole of the EU, starting from $426b circa 1992.
In US dollars. You can't use USD inflation numbers for other countries, Euro inflated much less than US dollars in these years. The effect you see where Europe has stagnated given USD levels of inflation is just the effect of USD currently being a bubble. If you use their internal inflation numbers then the economies of Europe are growing just fine.
A lot of US economy is not real. A lot of the GDP is based on financial services, real estate, and stocks (including tech), which are pure bubble money. A lot of the economy is also based on health care, which basically doesn't exist is a decent country with public services. The other part is "defense", which means they threat the rest of the world into growing their economy.
Interesting stats nonetheless, I wasn't aware that Europe had stagnated so much. Your stats seem a little off; Most of the stagnation seems to have occurred from the GFC onwards, rather than before (using GDP per capita numbers)
No, they aren't. German real (=inflation adjusted) GDP and real GDP per capita are much higher than in 1995.
(real GDP) https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp (real GDP per capita) https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-per-capita
France looks similar.
I don't know where you got your numbers, or if you did something like take the nominal GDP in USD and then adjust using the US CPI.
Random European engineers have few opportunities to take risks at all. It is not a question about attitude.