> America is more daring, more exciting, and there are more opportunities when you have the right cards to do something. But if you had a bad hand to start with, then you're royally screwed.

This seems a little contradictory. Being daring and exciting as a country and an economy would be more like how America used to be, where the upside of having people dying in the street was that if you came here and you had drive and talent, you were much more likely to become wealthy and successful. This is in contrast to the way much of Europe functioned at the time, where a more entrenched and institutionalized class system meant that your position in life (by and large) was set at birth.

As it stands now (I believe over the last couple of decades), America performs _worse_ than every comparable developed country but Great Britain when it comes to income mobility[1].

[1] From a study done by the London School of Economics: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/about/news/intergenerationalmobility.pd...