Anyone who flies an airplace, drives sports cars, or programs industrial control systems, knows that the fastest and most responsive controls operate on the very edge of instability.?? In many applications, this is desireable; is it so in business?

In The American Enterprise, John Gartner, a clinical psychologist teaching at Johns Hopkins University, outlines his thesis that many of the character traits of entrepreneurs are classical symptoms of hypomania, a state just short of true (hospital-grade) mania.

During the 1990s I was planning to write a book about religious movements started by manic prophets (of which there is a long and powerful history in America). But I began to be distracted by a messianic movement happening all around me in the present tense?the believers in the new economy. It occurred to me that American entrepreneurs are largely hypomanic, and that their creations were changing history …

I interviewed a sample of ten Internet CEOs. … I read each a list of hypomanic traits culled from the psychiatric literature, and asked whether, in his experience, these traits are typical of an entrepreneur … All of the entrepreneurs agreed that the overall description was accurate, and they endorsed all the hypomanic traits [with only two?exceptions] …

Most of my subjects expressed their agreement with excitement: ?Wow, that?s right on target!? When I asked them to rate their level of agreement for each trait on a standard five-point scale, many gave fives and sixes. One subject repeatedly begged me to let him give a seven.

The whole article is interesting, but after explaining his initial theory, Gartner goes in an even more fascinating direction — has America’s history of?[comparatively] open-door immigration actually fostered this trait?

If a scientist wanted to design a giant petri dish with all the right nutrients to make hypomanic genius flourish, he would be hard-pressed to imagine a better natural experiment than America. A ?nation of immigrants? represents a highly skewed and unusual ?self-selected? population. Do men and women who risk everything to leap into a new world differ temperamentally from those who stay home? It would be surprising if they didn?t. ?Immigrants are unusual people,? wrote James Jaspers in Restless Nation. “Only one out of a hundred people emigrate, and they tend to be imbued ?with special drive, ambition and talent.?

As one point of evidence, he quotes a survey which found that 91% of Americans believe starting a new business is a respectable occupation — compared to 28% of British and only 8% of Japanese respondents.

By all means, read the whole thing.