American spirit

Chris Williamson made an observation I keep coming back to. Ivy League universities produce eight times the number of successful business founders as Oxbridge. Eight times. Two institutions with similar prestige, similar resources, similar academic calibre. One produces founders at a rate that makes the other look like it's barely trying.

I know I'm not the first person to notice this tension. Tocqueville spent half a book on it in the 1830s. There are podcasts, essays, Twitter threads. And I'm not writing this as someone who's observed it from the outside. I've spent a lot of time in America and felt it first-hand across a lot of different contexts. This is less a thesis and more me confirming what I already knew to myself, partly prompted by spending a few weeks visiting history museums along the East Coast, where something about standing in those rooms and reading the original documents made the why feel a lot clearer.

The difference isn't the quality of the education. It's what the students believe is possible when they leave.

There's a version of ambition that's particular to America, and I'm not sure British people fully understand it from the outside. Americans operate on an assumption that's almost cultural bedrock: if you think clearly enough and work hard enough, things will work out. Not naive. Structural. It's baked into how they talk, how they approach problems, how they introduce themselves at a party.

The hospitality is the first thing you notice. Americans are genuinely warm in a way that catches you off guard if you've grown up in Britain. It's a baseline generosity of spirit that reflects a deeper worldview: the world is big enough for everyone to win.

British people often assume we're similar to Americans. Same language, shared ancestry, cousins really. This is one of the most misleading things we tell ourselves. We're not similar. We're two very different cultures that happen to speak the same language, which actually makes the gap more confusing when you run into it.

Where it comes from

I think it's the founding.

Walking around the history museums, reading the original documents, looking at the artefacts, it becomes obvious in a way that reading about it doesn't quite replicate. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. These aren't just legal documents. They're a set of beliefs about what a person is and what they're entitled to, written down and made foundational before the country even existed. Individual liberty. The pursuit of happiness. Rights that belong to you by default, not rights granted to you by a ruler who can take them back.

Britain doesn't have this. We have centuries of hierarchy, of rights slowly negotiated downwards from the crown, of a class system that told most people their station was fixed. The instinct that produced the American founding, that individuals should be free to build their own lives and that the system should get out of the way, simply didn't win here in the same way.

And then there's the selection effect. You don't emigrate to a new world if you're comfortable where you are. The people who crossed the Atlantic were, by definition, unusually willing to bet on themselves. That risk tolerance gets baked into the founding culture, and it compounds. A country that starts with a population self-selected for ambition, then writes a constitution that treats individual freedom as non-negotiable, produces a different kind of person than one that doesn't.

Oxbridge is the British equivalent of Ivy League prestige, but the experience is almost the inverse. You spend three years in a place where everything is old and you're made to feel like a steward of it, not a builder of something new. The best Ivy League experience does something different: it tells you that you're now among people who are going to matter, and you'd better figure out what you're going to do about it. One institution teaches you to maintain. The other teaches you to create. The result, statistically, is eight to one.

The useful kind of delusional

The Americans who I've found most impressive aren't naive. They're clear-eyed about difficulty and risk. What they don't do is let that assessment become a reason not to begin. The starting assumption is different: hard is the normal state of things, not a signal that you shouldn't bother.

There's a version of cynicism in British culture that dresses itself up as intelligence. Believing something is unlikely to work is treated as the mark of a clear-eyed realist. Being genuinely enthusiastic about something is treated with mild suspicion. But cynicism without doing the work isn't intelligence. It's just not trying.

The "delusional" label gets applied to American optimism as an insult, and I understand why. But spend time with people who build significant things and you'll notice that a certain kind of productive delusion is almost a prerequisite. The belief that you can do something before you have proof you can is what creates the proof. You can call that delusional if you like. You can also call it eight times the output.

Trying to think differently

I think I do have some of this in me, but not enough. When I have an idea, there's still a reflex to reach for reasons it won't work before I've properly interrogated whether it might. That's conditioning, not reasoning. The difference matters.

What I've found useful is to notice when I'm confusing caution with intelligence. One is a considered response to a specific risk. The other is a cultural default that has you playing defence before the game's even started.

I wrote about crab bucket Britain a couple of months ago, and this is the other side of that coin. The British instinct is to pull things back down. The American instinct is to push things up and see what happens. Neither is unconditionally right. But when I look at what the two instincts produce, I know which one I'd rather have running in the background.

I still catch myself reaching for reasons not to try before I've properly thought it through. Probably always will to some degree. But I notice it now, which I think is most of the battle.

America produces a culture that genuinely believes things can be built, and then turns out people who go and build them. The warmth is real. The optimism is real. The output is real. I have a lot of time for it.