A Tentative Theory About 20th Century Germany and the US and the Impact of Conscious Social Change on Entrepreneurship

Germany went through multiple, unmistakably distinct phases in the 20th century—imperial, Nazi, occupied, divided East/West, and reunified liberal democracy. The United States changed profoundly too, but in a way that more often felt continuous: less externally imposed, less punctuated by regime replacement, and easier to narrate as organic evolution.
I think we could argue that Germany is more aware that it is constructed, that things could be very different, and that the US is more forgetful of its past. In Germany norms changed abruptly. In the US, they seemed to evolve more organically. In the U.S., many ruptures were narrated as fulfillment (continuity with founding ideals), which keeps “constructedness” less visible.

I'll offer the tentative theory that the US makes it easier for entrepreneurial imagination to flourish but in Germany entrepreneurial efforts might be safer. Put differently, entrepreneurial imagination flourishes more easily in societies that “forget” (where norms feel flexible), but it flourishes more safely and scalably in societies that “know they’re constructed” (where people can redesign rules deliberately). Strong institutions can increase safety and scalability while still reducing the rate of deviation or entrepreneurship. 

Entrepreneurial imagination needs two permissions. First, the cultural permission to deviate—to try something strange without being socially exiled. That’s why looser cultures often produce more startups and experimentation. But imagination also needs a second permission: the institutional permission to scale—rules that make trust, contracts, and cooperation reliable. Without that, entrepreneurship may be abundant but not especially productive. The sweet spot is a society loose enough to try and self-aware enough to redesign the rules so the good experiments can compound.

The practical implication is that entrepreneurial societies need to build institutional literacy: the ability to change rules deliberately without breaking the hidden load-bearing norms. Looseness produces ideas; constructedness produces guardrails. Progress needs both—permission to deviate, and the capacity to institutionalize what works.