Wealth Creators

While natural resources, an abundant labor supply, available capital and the Protestant ethic of hard work and thrift all contributed to America's phenomenal economic development, Trinity College economics professor Gunderson, in his remarkably lucid, nontechnical, popular history, accords even greater credit to the motivation and initiative of individual and group entrepreneurs who possessed an ability to change and develop new technologies without which, he contends, an economy or society stagnates. Moreover, he persuasively challenges the view that modern growth did not begin until the Industrial Revolution, citing the entrepreneurial activities of the colonists (including those in shipping, which, he maintains, enabled the fledgling nation to defeat the British). He follows the evolution of entrepreneurs from such early 19th century inventors as Fulton, Morse and Cyrus McCormick to the great late 19th and 20th century tycoon-innovators who contributed to the unparalled growth of the country. But many of these entrepreneur-founders, he notes, failed to fill the new leadership demands of complex, publicly held mega-corporations, especially in the new service and electronic industries. (Apr.)