The Triple Package Read online

  ALSO BY

  AMY CHUA

  Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

  Day of Empire:

  How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall

  World on Fire:

  How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

  ALSO BY

  JED RUBENFELD

  The Death Instinct

  The Interpretation of Murder

  Freedom and Time:

  A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government

  Revolution by Judiciary:

  The Structure of American Constitutional Law

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

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  First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Chua, Amy.

  The triple package : how three unlikely traits explain the rise and fall of cultural groups in America / Amy Chua, Jed Rubenfeld.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-101-61013-8

  1. Temperament—United States. 2. Personality—United States. 3. Ethnic groups—United States. 4. Success—United States. 5. American Dream. I. Rubenfeld, Jed, 1959– II. Title.

  BF798.C48 2014 2013039970

  305.5’230973—dc23

  Version_1

  To

  SOSO

  and

  LULU

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY AMY CHUA

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1 THE TRIPLE PACKAGE

  CHAPTER 2 WHO’S SUCCESSFUL IN AMERICA?

  CHAPTER 3 THE SUPERIORITY COMPLEX

  CHAPTER 4 INSECURITY

  CHAPTER 5 IMPULSE CONTROL

  CHAPTER 6 THE UNDERSIDE OF THE TRIPLE PACKAGE

  CHAPTER 7 IQ, INSTITUTIONS, AND UPWARD MOBILITY

  CHAPTER 8 AMERICA

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  IT IS ONE OF HUMANITY’S ENDURING MYSTERIES why some individuals rise from unpromising origins to great heights, when so many others, facing similar obstacles and with seemingly similar capabilities, don’t rise at all.

  This book is about that age-old question. We wrote it hoping that readers might come away with a better understanding of the world we live in—a world in which certain individuals and groups do strikingly better than others in terms of wealth, position, and other conventional measures of success.

  The paradoxical premise of this book is that successful people tend to feel simultaneously inadequate and superior. Certain groups tend to make their members feel this way more than others; groups that do so are disproportionately successful. This unlikely combination of qualities is part of a potent cultural package that generates drive: a need to prove oneself that makes people systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment. Groups that instill this kind of drive in their members have a special advantage in America, because contemporary American culture teaches a contrary message—a message of self-acceptance and living in the moment.

  —

  THIS BOOK BRINGS together two very different bodies of work and expertise. One of the two authors has written for almost twenty years about successful ethnic minorities all over the world, from Southeast Asia to Africa to the former Soviet Union. The other has written extensively on how the desire to live in the present has come increasingly to dominate modern Western culture, especially in America, undermining the country’s ability to live for the future. America was not always this way; in fact, as we’ll discuss, the United States was born a Triple Package country.

  —

  THAT CERTAIN GROUPS DO much better in America than others—as measured by income, occupational status, test scores, and so on—is difficult to talk about. In large part this is because the topic feels racially charged. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes. There are black and Hispanic subgroups in the United States far outperforming many white and Asian subgroups. Moreover, there’s a demonstrable arc to group success—in immigrant groups, it typically dissipates by the third generation—puncturing the notion of innate group differences and undermining the whole concept of “model minorities.”

  This book offers a new way to look at success—its hidden spurs, its inner dynamics, its costs. These costs can be high, even crippling. But when properly understood and harnessed, the package of three cultural traits described in this book becomes a source of empowerment unconfined by any particular definition of success. As we’ll show, the Triple Package can be a ladder to accomplishment of any kind, including that which is measured not by gain to oneself, but by service to others.

  Ultimately, the Triple Package is accessible to anyone. It’s a set of values and beliefs, habits and practices, that individuals from any background can make a part of their lives or their children’s lives, enabling them to pursue success as they define it.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE TRIPLE PACKAGE

  A SEEMINGLY UN-AMERICAN FACT about America today is that certain groups starkly outperform others. Some of America’s most successful groups won’t surprise you; others might.

  What do the current or recent CFOs or CEOs of American Express, Black & Decker, Citigroup, Dell, Fisher-Price, Deloitte, JetBlue, Marriott International, Sears, Roebuck, Huntsman, Skullcandy, Sam’s Club, and Madison Square Garden have in common? They are all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1980, it was hard to find a Mormon on Wall Street. Today, Mormons are dominant players in America’s corporate boardrooms, investment firms, and business schools.

  Mormons aren’t the only ones to rise out of nowhere. The death of upward mobility in America has been widely reported in recent years. If you’re an American born after 1960, we’re told, how well you do is heavily dependent on how well your parents did. Overall this may be true, but the American Dream—including the old-fashioned rags-to-riches version—is very much alive for certain groups, particularly immigrants.*

  After 1959, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled to Miami, most arriving destitute. Initially facing hostility—NO DOGS, NO CUBANS signs on rental buildings were common—they crammed into small apartments and became dishwashers, janitors, and tomato pickers. These Cuban exiles, together with their children, helped transform sleepy Miami into one of America’s most vibrant business centers. By 1990, the percentage of U.S.-born Cuban Americans with household incomes over $50,000 was double that of Anglo-Americans. Although less than 4 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, Cuban Americans in 2002 accounted for five of the top ten wealthiest Hispanics in the United States,
and today are two and a half times more likely than Hispanic Americans overall to be making over $200,000 a year.

  In 2004, two Harvard professors created an uproar when they pointed out that a majority of Harvard’s black students—possibly up to two-thirds—were immigrants or their children (as opposed to blacks whose families had been in America for many generations). Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries—such as Jamaica, Haiti, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Liberia—are climbing America’s higher education ladder, but the most prominent are Nigerians. A mere 0.7 percent of the U.S. black population, Nigerian Americans, most of them raised by hardworking, often struggling immigrant parents, account for at least ten times that percentage of black students at America’s most elite universities and professional schools. Predictably, this academic success has translated into economic success. Nigerian Americans are already markedly overrepresented at Wall Street investment banks and blue-chip law firms.

  Of course, who’s “successful” in America depends on how you define success. For some, the most successful life may be the one spent doing the most good. For others, it could be the life most devoted to God. For Socrates, wealth and prizes were but the false semblances of success; life had to be examined to be worth living. But for reasons that could fill the pages of an entire library—or be sterilely reduced to the laws of supply and demand—goodness, religiosity, and self-awareness are not what modern economies reward. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. referred to success “in its vulgar sense” as “the gaining of money and position” (and then went on to give advice about how to attain it). Later we’ll turn to the costs and narrowness of such success, but the stubborn question remains: Why do some groups rise in this “vulgar sense” while others don’t? And why do some groups simply outperform the rest?

  Indian Americans have the highest income of any Census-tracked ethnic group, almost twice the national average. Chinese, Iranian, and Lebanese Americans are not far behind. Asians are now so overrepresented at Ivy League schools that they’re being called the “new Jews,” and many believe that tacit quotas are being applied against them. It’s important to emphasize that even the children of poor and poorly educated East Asian immigrants—Chinese seamstresses, Korean grocers, Vietnamese refugees—outperform other racial minority groups and their white American counterparts.

  Meanwhile, the actual Jews continue to rack up Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, Tony Awards, and hedge-fund billions at a rate wildly disproportionate to their numbers. In a nationwide study of young to middle-age adults, median American household net worth in 2004 was found to be $99,500; among Jewish respondents, it was $443,000. In 2009, although just 1.7 percent of the adult population, Jews accounted for twenty of Forbes’s top fifty richest Americans and over a third of the top four hundred.

  Groups can also fall precipitously in their fortunes. In the early 1900s, when Max Weber wrote his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Protestants still dominated the American economy. Today, American Protestants are below average in wealth, and being raised in an Evangelical or fundamentalist Protestant family is correlated with downward economic mobility.

  —

  THIS BOOK IS ABOUT the rise and fall of groups. Its thesis is that when three distinct forces come together in a group’s culture, they propel that group to disproportionate success. Unfortunately, there’s a darker side to the story as well. The same forces that boost success also carry deep pathologies, and this book is about those pathologies too.

  It turns out that for all their diversity, America’s overachieving groups are linked together by three cultural commonalities, each one of which violates a core tenet of modern American thinking. For lack of a less terrible name, we’ll call these three cultural forces, taken together, the Triple Package. Its elements are:

  1. A SUPERIORITY COMPLEX. This element of the Triple Package is the easiest to define: a deeply internalized belief in your group’s specialness, exceptionality, or superiority. This belief can derive from widely varying sources. It can be religious, as in the case of Mormons. It can be rooted in a story about the magnificence of your people’s history and civilization, as in the case of Chinese or Persians. It can be based on identity-defining social distinctions that most Americans have never even heard of, such as descending from the “priestly” Brahman caste, in the case of some Indian Americans, or belonging to the famously entrepreneurial Igbo people, in the case of many Nigerian immigrants. Or it could be a mix. At their first Passover Seders, Jewish children hear that Jews are the “chosen” people; later they will be taught that Jews are a moral people, a people of law and intellect, a people of survivors.

  A crucial point about the Superiority Complex is that it is antithetical to mainstream liberal thinking, which teaches us to refrain from judging any individual or any life to be better than another. Everyone is equal to everyone else. And if individual superiority judgments are frowned on, group superiority judgments are anathema. Group superiority is the stuff of racism, colonialism, imperialism, Nazism. Yet every one of America’s extremely successful groups fosters a belief in its own superiority.

  2. INSECURITY. As we will use the term, insecurity is a species of discontent—an anxious uncertainty about your worth or place in society, a feeling or worry that you or what you’ve done or what you have is in some fundamental way not good enough. Insecurity can take many different forms: a sense of being looked down on; a perception of peril; feelings of inadequacy; a fear of losing what one has. Everyone is probably insecure in one way or another, but some groups are more prone to it than others. To be an immigrant is almost by definition to be insecure—an experience of deep economic and social anxiety, not knowing whether you can earn a living or give your children a decent life.

  That insecurity should be a critical lever of success is another anathema, flouting the entire orthodoxy of contemporary popular and therapeutic psychology. Feelings of inadequacy are a diagnostically recognized symptom of personality disorder. If you’re insecure—if you feel that in some fundamental way you’re not good enough—then you lack self-esteem, and if you lack self-esteem, you aren’t on your way to a successful life. On the contrary, you should probably be in therapy. And the greatest anathema of all would be parents working to instill insecurity in their children. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s most successful groups, and these groups not only suffer from insecurity; they tend, consciously or unconsciously, to promote it.

  Note that there’s a deep tension between insecurity and a superiority complex. It’s odd to think of people being simultaneously insecure but also convinced of their divine election or superiority. Yet this tense, unstable combination, as we’ll discuss shortly, is precisely what gives the Triple Package its potency.

  3. IMPULSE CONTROL. As we’ll use the term, impulse control refers to the ability to resist temptation, especially the temptation to give up in the face of hardship or quit instead of persevering at a difficult task. No society could exist without impulse control; as Freud speculated, civilization may begin with the suppression of primal sexual and aggressive instincts. Nevertheless, against the background of a relatively permissive America, some groups decidedly place greater emphasis on impulse control than others.

  Impulse control, too, runs powerfully against the grain of contemporary culture. The term “impulse control” conjures up all kinds of negative connotations: “control freaks,” people who are “too controlled” or “too controlling,” people who can’t be “impulsive” and enjoy life. People who control their impulses don’t live in the present, and living in the present is an imperative of modernity. Learning to live in the here and now is the lesson of countless books and feel-good movies, the key to overcoming inhibition and repression. Impulse control is for adults, not for the young, and modern culture is above all a youth culture.

  As we increasingly disrespect old age and try to erase its very marks from our faces, we correspondingly
romanticize childhood, imagining it as a time of what ought to be unfettered happiness, and we grow ever more fearful of spoiling that happiness through excessive restraints, demands, hardships, or discipline. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood and of impulse control in general, inculcating habits of discipline from an early age—or at least they did so when they were on the rise.

  Because all three elements of the Triple Package run so counter to modern American culture, it makes sense that America’s successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another. It also makes sense that so many immigrant communities are pockets of exceptional upward mobility in an increasingly stratified American economy. Paradoxically, in modern America, a group has an edge if it doesn’t buy into—or hasn’t yet bought into—mainstream, post-1960s, liberal American principles.

  —

  WHY IS THE TRIPLE PACKAGE so powerful an engine of group success? It begins with drive, generated by the unlikely convergence of the first two Triple Package forces.

  You might think that a superiority complex and insecurity would be mutually exclusive, that it would be hard for these two qualities to coexist in a single individual. And that’s exactly the point: it is an odd and unstable combination. But this fusion of superiority and insecurity lies at the heart of every Triple Package culture, and together they tend to produce a goading chip on the shoulder, a need to prove oneself or be recognized.

  Jews have had a chip of just this kind for basically all of recorded history—or at least since Hadrian, after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, barred Jews from entering Jerusalem and erected a large marble pig outside the city gates. In America, the millions of poor Eastern European Jews who arrived in the early twentieth century, viewed as filthy and degenerate not only by Gentiles but also by America’s German Jews as well, seemed, as one author puts it, “almost to wear a collective chip on the shoulder.” The same could be said of the next generation: men like Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Clement Greenberg, Norman Podhoretz, and so many of the New York intellectuals who grew up excluded from anti-Semitic bastions of education and culture but went on to become famous writers and critics.