Tens of millions of Americans stayed up last night watching a special two-hour finale of the NBC television show “The Apprentice.” For those who didn’t tune in, this is the “reality TV” show that features real estate mogul Donald Trump and a cast of 16 contestants competing for a $250,000-a-year job with the Trump Organization. One or two contestants are “fired” each week. The program has been a hit. In its lead story yesterday, USA Today reported that the show is the seventh most popular program on television, and that it is even more popular among viewers age 18 to 49.

The two finalists competing last night for the Trump apprenticeship share rags to — at least potential — riches stories. Bill Rancic is the son of a college professor. He worked his own way through college by starting a boat wash-and-wax business. He later started, from his 400-square-foot studio apartment, a Web-based cigar business that became a multimillion dollar operation. The other finalist, Kwame Jackson, an African-American, had a grandfather who could only sign his name with an “X.”His mother was the first in his family to finish college. Mr. Jackson has a Harvard MBA and worked at Goldman Sachs.

What does that say about America? Well, for one thing, the American dream is alive and well. The tales of Mr. Rancic and Mr. Jackson aren’t all that different from those of Horatio Alger’s books that sold so well from 1860 to 1910. It’s old-fashioned, bootstraps, work-your-way-up capitalism. Private enterprise. The contestants on “The Apprentice” aren’t trying to figure out a way to redistribute Mr. Trump’s wealth to the poor. They aren’t making fun of him. They aspire to be like him, in his success as a capitalist. In the episodes, their assigned tasks often involve ways of making more money for Mr. Trump. No one seems so upset about the fact that some contestants are fired, at least not so upset that they want to change the employment laws to require lifetime tenure.

There may be subcultures in America, stronger perhaps a few decades ago — and whole classes in Europe — that have nothing but scorn for people like Mr. Trump. He works for a living rather than coasting on a trust fund, and his penchant for gilt and his constant self-promotion might strike some as tacky, nouveau riche. His values, and those of the “Apprentice” contestants, might be scorned as bourgeois by the tie-dyed populations of coffee houses and the jaded, black-clad denizens of some art galleries.

But tens of millions of Americans interpret this televised competition as healthy all-American entrepreneurship rather than as crass greed. And the size of the “Apprentice” audience — particularly among the younger crowd — is just one of many long-term positive signals these days about the health of the American economy.