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Notes -
I believe, one part of it is this: When life is difficult and you have very few safety nets, every decision you make matters. If you start making such decisions that matter as a 15-year old, by age 20 you are quite used to making such decisions. Also, looking around, you will see a self-selected sample, because those who made abysmally bad decisions or simply unlucky decisions are in the poorhouse or dead.
Other part, look at the safety nets. Most often they are implemented as professionalized bureaucracies: by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats, with standardized paperwork. The British copied the idea of civil service from imperial China, which was not a country known for dynamism. Nearly every Westerner is trained in an environment of bureaucracy (school) that both explicitly and also implicitly trains them to function in another bureaucracy later on. One distinctive feature of a bureaucratic organization is that it can administer rewards for conformity and punishments for non-conformity very reliably. It is designed by humans to function so. You interact with them in a standardized way. Other methods of human organization, such as free competition or informal social networks are quite different. Non-human forces of nature are similarly unforgiving as bureaucracies, but (used to be) unpredictable and not designed by humans.
Final part: I agree it seems like people are very risk-averse compared to previous. I myself feel quite risk-averse. Is it an accurate measure of change of rate in risk-taking? Plenty of people decided stay on the same farm, farming it the same way as their parents and grandparents did, generations after generations. Mostly, we don't hear of them.
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