IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v38y1978i02p439-456_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

American Entrepreneurs and the Horatio Alger Myth

Author

Listed:
  • Sarachek, Bernard

Abstract

Since 1925 a number of scholars have conducted studies of the general business elite in America. Their studies have concluded that the American business elite has been predominantly native born, urban, better educated than the general population, and has originated disproportionately from higher economic classes. These conclusions are not surprising. It might have been surprising if the business elite were found to have emerged predominantly from the poor and less educated, and the immigrant, farm or working-class populations. Such origins would infer a rapid displacement of elite members, the possibility of rapid and massive disaggregation of family fortunes, and the loss of family aggrandizement as a motivating consideration in the minds of aspiring businessmen. This, however, was apparently not the case.

Suggested Citation

  • Sarachek, Bernard, 1978. "American Entrepreneurs and the Horatio Alger Myth," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 38(2), pages 439-456, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:38:y:1978:i:02:p:439-456_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022050700105169/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Holtz-Eakin, Douglas & Rosen, Harvey S & Weathers, Robert, 2000. "Horatio Alger Meets the Mobility Tables," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 14(4), pages 243-274, June.
    2. Minns, Chris & Rizov, Marian, 2005. "The spirit of capitalism? Ethnicity, religion, and self-employment in early 20th century Canada," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 42(2), pages 259-281, April.
    3. Sahin, M. & Nijkamp, P. & Rietdijk, M., 2009. "Cultural Diversity and Urban Innovativeness: Personal and Business Characteristics of Urban Migrant Entrepreneurs," Serie Research Memoranda 0033, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics.
    4. Bögenhold, Dieter & Fachinger, Uwe, 2012. "Unternehmertum: Unterschiedliche Facetten selbstständiger Berufstätigkeit [Entrepreneurship: Diverse aspects of self-employment]," MPRA Paper 51459, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:38:y:1978:i:02:p:439-456_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jeh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.