"AMERICAN Business Leaders" "suggests if it does not prove" that inborn ability rather than unequal opportunity is still the predominant explanation in the success stories of America's industrial captains. Professor Taussig, director of the research and author with Mr. Joslyn, arrives at his conclusion after a masterful and scholarly analysis of his statistics. While eminently understandable by the layman, the book is at the same time exhaustively precise with interesting appendices, sufficient for the most particularizing pedant.

The study constitutes undoubtedly one of the most careful researches into the origin of one of the higher classes that has ever been made. It is compiled with unusual shrewdness and skill, particularly in comparison to other similar studies. With a comparatively unassuming and concise set of nine questions as a basis, Professor Taussig and Mr. Joslyn have deduced a surprisingly large amount of statistical material. The questions were the respondent's age, age at which he entered business, the most important position held, age at attaining this position, the size of the business, the principal occupation of the respondent's father, the extent of the respondent's schooling, and whether financial aid in excess of $10,000 or any other aid from influential friends was received which would furnish a special advantage in attaining the position of leadership. The logical and accurate form of the entire survey should serve as a model to other statistical researchers.

A denial of the accusation that we are creating a "caste-like society" where workers are forever exploited by the rich in this country, "American Business Leaders" shows that no single class, as yet, has a predominant hold on high positions. While leaders are being recruited more and more from the ranks of the college or business school graduates this may be explained by the greatly increasing per cent of the population with such training. Two thirds of the leaders in the survey were without college education although the percentage of college men holding high positions in the largest corporations was greater than the percent of college men in the group as a whole. Men who entered college but did not graduate comprised 13 percent of the leaders in Professor Taussig's list. Men of exceptional ability apparently reached their goal with or without the advantages of education or inherited wealth.

These aspiring to an early success will be interested to see that there in a greater proportion of young business leaders in the small than in the large corporations. Dividing the 7,371 selected leaders into age groups of five years, it was discovered that the largest group was that from 50 to 54 years of age, which constituted 17.1 per cent. Only 1.1 per cent were under 30. Those who received financial aid in excess of $10,000 reached their positions about two years sooner than those without such aid.

That economic position is a fair rough estimate of inherent ability is indicated by the fact that business owners and executives, per ten thousand married males in the population at large are roughly 110 times as productive in business leaders as the unskilled laboring class and 12 times as productive of leaders as the class of skilled laborers. The farming classes are producing progressively less leaders and this decrease is being made up by an increase in the sons of business men rather than by an allround increase in the contributions of other classes.

Professor Taussig has never been conspicuous for his head-long boldness or panther-like jumping at conclusions and his usual caution has not deserted him in "American Business Leaders." In contradiction to journalistic style, he opens each chapter with a series of explanations, reservations, and qualifications; gingerly indicating toward the end a few acceptable conclusions. This unnecessary humility on Professor Taussig's part is the reviewer's only object of criticism.

"American Business Leaders" should stand as a classic study of the origins of our industrial executives. It presents completely, yet interestingly, not how they got there, but whence they came.