Us Europeans are more 'detached' from the economy than people are in the USA. We basically coast along. We don't live on credit, but debit, and most people have zero investments outside their house. We're content and risk adverse and don't care much for the stock market (even though many people's pensions are tied to it). In places where higher education is cheap, or even sometimes free (like Sweden), there's less pr…
That's not exactly true. The single market has been a great thing for companies producing physical products. That's also what was in mind of the people who designed the single market. They wanted to unify standards for physical stuff. Because back then, there were no digital services to speak of. "Analog" services were naturally limited in their scaling capability so they weren't in focus, but mankind had back then just learned to scale up physical production, and the single market for physical goods has largely worked out great to shape global standards and stay competitive in the area of anything that's traded and touchable.
What's been created is a bad fit for digital products and services, unfortunately. The legal frameworks covering purely digital services are far less unified than the standards for physical goods. And digital services are way more reliant on localization than physical stuff is. No amount of EU single market legislation will ever be able to eliminate the language barriers, much less other cultural barriers that are often hindering digital services successful in one EU country from being adopted in neighboring EU countries.
Therefore, for those digital services that benefit greatly from network effects, it'll be hard for European variants to ever beat their US counterparts on the domestic turfs, and virtually impossible on the global market. However, not all digital services are dependent on network effects, so there are good reasons to continue trying to make the EU single market more applicable to digital services and to foster domestic offerings whereever possible, even if that strategy will probably never lead to the next Facebook or Instagram or Amazon to be built by a EU company.