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That’s clearly part of it but America also has an entrepreneurial spirit that Europe does not. By 1990, Europe had almost caught up to the United States. But since then the US has grown and grown while Europe has stagnated. That has nothing to do with WWII and everything to do with Europe’s self destructive socialist tendencies.
I'm perfectly willing to blame at least half of that stagnation on US foreign policy specifically. Not just because the American defense umbrella allows for shambolic spending on social concerns instead of industrial and research concerns, but primarily because they engaged in very specific direct and indirect actions to prevent European economic activity outpacing that of the USA. And they did so in conjunction with the USSR, ironically enough.
I don't blame the Americans for wanting to stay on top, nor am I deluded enough to think that Europeans are blameless, but the idea that Europe's incapable of embracing entrepreneurship is silly given that it was the literal birthplace of the industrial revolution.
The fact that Europe was the birthplace of literal capitalism (and this after the US had been established) is an even stronger argument IMO.
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Wholly willing to believe that culture has an effect, or that culture and prosperity can interact in positive or negative loops.
But I think the point still stands that people are willing to imitate American culture for precisely as long as they think it will make them rich, and that the ‘liberalism reliably causes prosperity’ thesis is not as strong as people sometimes make it out to be.
On a separate point, Britain still has a pretty entrepreneurial culture - we make lots of startups. But almost all of them go to the USA. Partly because of regulation, but also because that’s where all the investor funding is. Prosperity begets prosperity. Poverty begets cautiousness.
On a separate, separate note I think Europe’s 1990s prosperity was a dead cat bounce, caused by opening the country up to wild financialism and selling off everything to wealthy foreign buyers. Not all of it - beating socialism and the unions clearly had an effect. But not nearly enough to become America.
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