I'm Norwegian, and I think a lot of people don't realise how big of a deal this feeling of security can be. I left university to do a startup. It happened literally over the course of a week: We decided we wanted to start an ISP, wrote a business plan, found an angel investor, rented offices that we moved into (as in, we lived in rooms in the office) and got started.

While I was certainly willing to take bigger risks then, with no dependents, at no point did things like healthcare or my ability to get food or shelter enter into my considerations, and the extremely low risks for us involved in potential failure made the decision process for deciding to go for it very different on a personal level from the ones I've been involved in later, in the UK and US.

We did live on tiny amounts of money for the following two years - the first year we financed with our student loans, while still notionally studying. But the prospect of the business failing and leaving me destitute and without access to healthcare, for example, were not really possible. My worst case prospect of going on social benefits for a while would in fact quite possibly have raised my living standards above how I was living out of choice to try to get the business off the ground.

In retrospect, it's a fantastic level of freedom to have to never really have to worry about being put in any truly awful situation. I didn't really realise until I moved to the UK - while the healthcare system here measures up well with the Scandinavian systems, most other things are far less generous here (and contrary to what most people think, I don't pay all that much less tax than I did in Norway)