[smartician]

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.