[Review of the book American Business Leaders

Abstract

Reviews the book, American Business Leaders by F. W. Taussig and C. S. Joslyn (1932). The writers set out to determine the social classes from which American business leaders are recruited, the contribution of each class compared with its proportion in the population as a whole and finally the relative importance of heredity and environment in the constitution of business leaders. The reviewer's feeling would be that perhaps the attitude and atmosphere in the home may loom a little larger than the authors feel and that their conclusions should be tempered somewhat but he is not disposed to question their main thesis except by way of toning it down slightly. Their final conclusions on the matter may be best expressed by quoting the last sentence of the book: "Our results strongly suggest, even if they do not prove, that inequality of earning between the several occupational classes has its origin in a fundamental inequality of native endowments rather than in an inequality of opportunities." The book is well written and systematic and evidently was a careful piece of work. It represents a rather novel approach to these broad questions of heredity versus environment and psychologists interested in those problems will find it of considerable value. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)