[hoyd]

This made me think back to something I once attended, an eye opening weekend cross cultural course, with the purpose of getting to know the different nationalities I worked with. Why they/we would act/speak/behave as we do. We were a full ball room with multiple nationalities.

One of the speaks was about how different north is from the south, even within a country. Also, a huge difference was between Europe and US. Europe being a very old continent, lots of history and US a fairly new one, just a couple of hundred years old. The speaker said youths in US and Europe had been asked about whether they believed they would become millionaires during their life. About 90% in US had said yes vs. about 9% in Europe. The long statistics in Europe and fact that not so many will succeed had made us more realistic, but this new conquer-spirit that started US a long time ago, was still there.

[throwaway0a5e]

That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at is is that it takes more than a couple hundred years to shake off the expectations of societies with fairly rigid class systems.

Any plumber (or other blue collar tradesman who is in business for themselves) at the end of their career can have a million bucks in assets. A house, maybe a vacation house on a lake, a fleet of <10 cube vans that ranges from clapped out to brand new, it's not hard for that to add up to a million bucks in personally owned assets. What most people will never have is a million bucks in their checking account.