Introduction

Often celebrated as the ‘richest country in the world’, the US generates wealth through various means, the most prominent engine of this economic growth being innovation. From condensed milk to suspension bridges, Americans have been active inventors in either filling a niche or addressing a need. Many world rankings on entrepreneurial capacity, inclination, and behavior put Americans in the forefront, and there is little debate that Americans ‘play for keeps’, with high propensity for risk and even higher expectations of rewards.

Automation and computerization in the labor market have the increased potential for displacing many of today's youth from traditional jobs. The American response to this has been one of energizing youth to engage in small business start-ups and other entrepreneurial activities. While entrepreneurship is considered as an eminently reasonable pathway to solving the youth unemployment problem in the US, given its deep-seated, cultural proclivity for taking risks, can this approach work in other cultures/countries where risk taking is not so readily built into their culture?

This chapter will describe the work ethos of Americans, how this ethos manifests itself in the demand and supply sides of the labor market, and the extent to which the US has pursued an ‘entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment’ model. We also explore the feasibility of exporting this model to the Mediterranean countries that exhibit substantial problems with youth employment.

The American work ethos

Legendary works by Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville speak quite eloquently to American economic and political individualism. The right to make a living as one chooses, own property, make economic decisions in one's self-interest, practice self-reliance, and to have access to free markets and competition – all characteristics of economic individualism described by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) – are firmly embedded in the American psyche. Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville's (1840, 1945) masterpiece, Democracy in America, the US has been judged to be the exceptional capitalist democracy founded on the values of egalitarianism, liberty, individualism and laissez-faire economics (Lipset, 1979). De Tocqueville traces this exceptionalism to its ‘Puritanical origin’, its good fortune to exploit a European knowledge base without ‘laboring to amass this treasure’, and a geographical location and natural resources which facilitated boundless economic expansion (de Tocqueville, 1840: 37–40, and Chapter XIX on What Causes almost all Americans to Follow Industrial Callings).