The Triple Package Read online

  The capacity of group superiority complexes to enhance success is borne out by repeatedly confirmed findings of stereotype threat and stereotype boost, both in laboratory experiments and field work. Basically, belonging to a group you believe is superior at something—whether academic work or sports—psychologically primes you to perform better at that activity. Moreover, sociologists specializing in immigrant communities have found that certain groups turn a sense of cultural pride and distinctive heritage into an “ethnic armor” directly contributing to higher levels of educational achievement.

  That insecurity can spur accomplishment is corroborated by a recent groundswell of studies showing that a personal feeling of not being good enough—or not having done well enough—is associated with better outcomes. This conclusion is also supported by two of the leading twentieth-century studies of individuals who have risen to eminence, including one conducted by Howard Gardner, most famous for his theory of multiple intelligences. Both studies found that insecurity, particularly stemming from childhood, figured prominently as a surprisingly common driver of success. Gardner quotes Winston Churchill:

  the twinge of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished.

  Lastly, an entire subfield of experimental psychology today is devoted to phenomena variously called “effortful control,” “self-regulation,” “time discounting,” “ego strength,” or (more appealingly) “willpower” and “grit.” These concepts are all connected to impulse control, as we’re using the term: the capacity to resist temptation, especially the temptation to give up in the face of hardship. The results of these studies—beginning with the well-known “marshmallow test”—are conclusive and bracing. Kids with more impulse control go on to get better grades; spend less time in prison; have fewer teenage pregnancies; get better jobs; and have higher incomes. In several studies, willpower and grit proved to be better predictors of grades and future success than did IQ or SAT scores.

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  BEFORE CLOSING THIS CHAPTER, we need to say a word about something we didn’t include in the Triple Package: education. It’s often said that Jewish and Asian Americans do well in the United States because they come from “education cultures.” Given that the Triple Package is essentially a cultural explanation of group success, why isn’t education one of its core elements?

  Because, to begin with, there are some flat-out exceptions to the rule that successful groups emphasize learning. The immensely successful but highly insular Syrian Jewish enclave in Brooklyn does not stress education or intellectualism; indeed, higher education at prestigious universities is often disfavored. Instead this community prioritizes business, tradition, “taking over the family company,” and keeping younger generations within the fold. Because of its insularity, most people probably have never even heard of America’s Syrian Jewish community, but it’s been thriving for generations, economically as well as culturally, and elite education has decidedly not been part of its formula.

  Of course it’s true that most successful groups in America do emphasize education. They also tend to save and work hard. The question is why. The worst move to make at this point—the kind of move that gives cultural theories a bad name—is to take these behaviors, turn them into adjectives, impute them to culture, and offer them up as “explanations.” Why do the Chinese save at such higher-than-average rates? Because they come from a “thrifty” culture. It’s the same with education. Why do parents from so many successful groups harp on education? Because they hail from an “education culture.”

  In fact, many of America’s rising groups, although they stress academics today, do not have longstanding “education cultures.” For example, although early Mormon pioneers founded many schools and colleges in the American West, an important current of Mormon culture for much of the twentieth century remained relatively closed to intellectual and scientific inquiry, emphasizing “the authority of scripture over human reason.” In 1967, future Church president Spencer Kimball urged the faculty of Brigham Young University to remember that Mormons are “men of God first and men of letters second, and men of science third . . . men of rectitude rather than academic competence.”

  Even when we consider cultures supposedly steeped in centuries-old scholarly traditions, the conclusion that they focus on education today because of those traditions can be much too facile. Jews, for example, are sometimes said to have the quintessential “learning culture.” Yet many of the Ellis Island Jewish immigrants were barely schooled, having lived most of their lives in shtetls or ghettos in extreme poverty. Perhaps these unintellectual butchers and tailors transmitted to their children the great Jewish “learning tradition” through synagogues, Passover rituals, or the respect they accorded rabbis. Or perhaps not.

  Nathan Glazer says that his immigrant parents and many of their generation knew nothing of Jewish learning. The influential social psychologist Stanley Schachter made a similar point:

  I went to Yale much against my father’s wishes. He couldn’t have cared less about higher education and wanted me to go to a one-year laundry college (no kidding) out in the Midwest and join him then in the family business. I never have understood what this intellectually driven Jewish immigrant business is all about. It wasn’t true of my family, and I know very few families for which it was true.

  Indeed, the Jewish subgroup arguably most dedicated to and organized around the old tradition of Talmudic study is the ultra-Orthodox Satmar community of Kiryas Joel, in Orange County, New York, which is one of the poorest groups in the entire nation.

  What is it about certain groups that makes their members, however poor or “uncultured,” seize on education as a route to upward mobility? It’s simply not illuminating to say that these groups come from “hardworking cultures” or “education cultures.” That’s one step away from saying that successful groups are successful because they do what it takes to be successful—and two steps from saying that unsuccessful groups are unsuccessful because they come from “indolent cultures” and don’t do what it takes to be successful.

  In short, education—like hard work—is not an independent, but a dependent variable. It’s not the explanatory factor; it’s a behavior to be explained. Successful groups in America emphasize education for their children because it’s the surest ladder to success. The challenge is to delve deeper and discover the cultural roots of this behavior—to identify the fundamental cultural forces that underlie it.

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  FOR ALL ITS VAST DIVERSITY, America has an overarching culture of its own—a very strong one. That’s why we hear so much about America’s worldwide “cultural hegemony” or how “globalization is Americanization.” Which raises the question of whether American culture is a Triple Package culture.

  Certainly it used to be. In fact, America was for a long time the quintessential Triple Package nation, convinced of its exceptional destiny, infused with a work ethic inherited from the Puritans, seized with a notorious chip on the collective shoulder vis-à-vis aristocratic Europe, and instilling a brand-new kind of insecurity in its citizens—a sense that every man must prove himself through material success, that a man who doesn’t succeed economically is a failure. Tocqueville observed all this when he described Americans’ “longing to rise.”

  But as we’ll discuss at length later in this book, America has changed, especially in the past fifty years. Today, American culture—whether high or low, blue state or red, blue collar or ivory tower—is much more ambivalent about, and undermining of, everything the Triple Package stands for. The overwhelming message taught in American schools, public and private, is that no group is superior to any other. In America, embracing yourself as you are—feeling secure about yourself—is supposed to be the key to a successful life. People who don’t live in the present are missing out on happiness and life itself.
Whatever kernels of truth may underlie these propositions, the irony is this: America still rewards people who don’t buy into them with wealth, prestige, and power.

  In other words, there is a disconnect today between the story Americans tell themselves about how to think and how to live—and the reality of what the American economy rewards. Triple Package groups are taking advantage of that disconnect.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHO’S SUCCESSFUL IN AMERICA?

  IN THIS CHAPTER WE’LL be taking a look at America’s most successful groups as measured by income, academic accomplishment, corporate leadership, professional attainment, and other conventional metrics. But first we should clarify the kind of groups we’re looking at.

  There are infinite ways to slice up the U.S. population. Countless economic mobility studies break down American wealth by race—typically white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. A recent countertrend focuses on class and class rigidity instead, dividing the population into quintiles, rich and poor, 99 percent and 1 percent. But gigantic umbrella terms like “race” and “class” obscure as much as they reveal.

  The reality, uncomfortable as it may be to talk about, is that some religious, ethnic, and national-origin groups are starkly more successful than others. Without looking squarely at such groups, it’s impossible to understand economic mobility in America and what the levers of success in this country really are.

  A distinctive feature of many—but by no means all—religious, ethnic, and national-origin groups is that they are “cultural groups”: their members tend to be raised with, identify themselves by, and pass down certain culturally specific values and beliefs, habits and practices.* Needless to say, religion, ethnicity, and national origin are cultural starting points, not end points. Cultural subdivisions within these categories—for example, fundamentalist versus non-fundamentalist, first-generation immigrant versus third-generation—can have dramatic effects on group success, and we’ll be highlighting these finer distinctions throughout.

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  IF THERE’S ONE GROUP in the U.S. today that’s hitting it out of the park with conventional success, it’s Mormons.

  Just fifty years ago, Mormons were often regarded as a fringe group; many Americans had barely heard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (The term “Mormon” is not part of the official Church name and comes from the Book of Mormon, a new work of scripture that the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, said he translated from golden plates received from an angel.) Concentrated in Utah and neighboring states, Mormons were a largely isolated and insulated community, resisting many developments in modern America. As late as 1978, the LDS Church expressly discriminated against blacks, refusing to ordain them into the priesthood. In 1980, Mormons were still a rarity on Wall Street and in Washington.

  Three decades later, it’s hard not to notice the Mormons’ explosive success. Overwhelmingly, Mormon success has been of the most mainstream, conventional, apple-pie variety. You don’t find a lot of Mormons breaking the mold or dropping out of college to form their own high-tech start-ups. (Omniture cofounder Josh James is a notable exception.) What you mostly find is corporate, financial, and political success, which makes perfect sense given the nature of the Mormon chip on the shoulder. Long regarded as a polygamous, almost crackpot sect, Mormons seem determined to prove they’re more American than other Americans—with a particular penchant for presidential runs.

  Whereas Protestants make up about 51 percent of the U.S. population, America’s 5 to 6 million Mormons represent just 1.7 percent. Yet a stunning number have risen to the top of America’s corporate and political spheres.

  Most famous of course is Mitt Romney, who, before serving as governor of Massachusetts for four years, was CEO of Bain Capital (and now has an estimated net worth of $230 million). Jon Huntsman Jr., former U.S. Ambassador to China and for a while Romney’s rival for the 2012 Republican nomination, is also Mormon, as is majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Harry Reid. Other leading Mormon politicians include Senator Orrin Hatch (who lost his bid for the 2000 Republican nomination to George W. Bush), Congressman Morris Udall (who lost his bid for the 1976 Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter), and Mitt’s father, former Michigan governor George Romney (who lost his bid for the 1968 Republican nomination to Richard Nixon).

  In the business world, prominent Mormons include David Neeleman, founder and former CEO of JetBlue; J. W. Marriott, chairman and son of the founders of Marriott International; Thomas Grimm, CEO of Sam’s Club; Dave Checketts, the former CEO of Madison Square Garden and former president of the New York Knicks who now heads up the sports and entertainment firm SCP Worldwide; Kevin Rollins, the former CEO of Dell; Gary Crittenden, the former CFO of Citigroup, American Express, and Sears, Roebuck; Gary Baughman, former CEO of Fisher-Price; Kim Clark, former dean of Harvard Business School; Alison Davis-Blake, the first female dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business; Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which has sold more than 25 million copies; and Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma (which Intel CEO Andy Grove said was the most important book he’d read in ten years), who was recently the subject of a New Yorker profile titled “When Giants Fail: What Business Has Learned from Clayton Christensen.”

  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Mormons have risen to the top of American Motors, Lufthansa, Deloitte, Kodak, Black & Decker, SkyWest Airlines, Lord & Taylor, Skullcandy, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Jon Huntsman Sr. became a billionaire on the Forbes 400 list after founding one of America’s most successful chemical companies. Alan Ashton cofounded WordPerfect Corporation, making him in the 1990s one of the four hundred richest people in America. Edwin Catmull, raised in a traditional Mormon Salt Lake City family, became a pioneer of three-dimensional computer animation in the 1980s; today he’s the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and its subsidiary, the twenty-six-time Academy Award–winning Pixar Studios.

  Mormons have achieved fame outside the corporate world as well. They are reportedly overrepresented in the CIA and foreign service (apparently because of their missionary-trained language skills and clean habits), and “out of nowhere,” Brigham Young University’s video animation program has become a main line into the country’s major animation and special effects studios. Stephenie Meyer, author of the blockbuster Twilight novels, is Mormon, as is talk-radio host Glenn Beck, Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder, and all-time Jeopardy! record-holder Ken Jennings (seventy-four consecutive wins).

  To be sure, a list of superstars, however impressive, doesn’t by itself prove disproportionate success, and it’s worth noting that Mormons are not (yet) overrepresented among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. But here’s one way to look at the startling rise of Mormons from relative obscurity into America’s business elite. The Fortune 500 list has been published since 1955. Before 1970, there appear to have been no Mormon senior executives in any Fortune 500 company. Since 1990, there have been fourteen, including twelve CEOs, one president, and one CFO.

  Here’s another data point. In February 2012, Goldman Sachs announced the addition of 300 more employees to the 1,300 already working in the firm’s third largest metropolitan center of operations (after New York/New Jersey and London). Where is this 1,600-employee location? In Salt Lake City, Utah. By reputation, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school is one of the nation’s best and most prestigious. In 2010, Wharton placed thirty-one of its graduates with Goldman—exactly the same number as did Brigham Young University’s less well-known Marriott School of Management.

  Getting a statistical fix on Mormon income and wealth is notoriously difficult. The country’s leading researcher on the correlation of faith and money in the United States, Lisa Keister, says that the sample sizes studied so far are too small to support definitive conclusions (although judging by available information, she surmises that Mormon wealth is probably higher than average).
Survey data paint a picture of Mormons as solidly middle-class. They are somewhat more likely to make $50,000–$100,000 than Americans generally (38 percent of Mormons versus 30 percent of the general population), somewhat less likely to make under $30,000 (26 percent versus 31 percent), and no more likely to make over $100,000 (in fact slightly less: 16 percent versus 18 percent).

  But these numbers are hard to interpret. First, they represent household income, and Mormon women are encouraged to be full-time mothers; the percentage of Mormon women who describe themselves as housewives is double that of non-Mormons. While this gives LDS men some advantages (Mormon journalist Jeff Benedict calls the “stay-at-home” wives of nine famous Mormon CEOs the “secret” to their success), it also means that LDS men have to earn considerably more than non-Mormon men in order to keep on a par with or above overall American household income.

  More important, these figures lump all Mormons together, which can be highly misleading. Mormonism is spreading rapidly around the world; one fourth of America’s Mormons are converts. While some of these converts are famous—Mr. Beck being an example—most are relatively poor, which brings down overall Mormon income. Non-convert Mormons are significantly more likely to make at least $50,000 a year than Americans overall (58 percent as compared with a national figure of 45 percent).

  Not all Mormon households, of course, are sending their young men to Goldman Sachs. Small fundamentalist Mormon communities still exist, which tend to be insular, polygamous, and relatively poor. (These groups are excommunicated from, and not considered Mormon by, the official LDS Church.) In Colorado City, Arizona, the “prophet” Rulon Jeffs remained the leader of one of these groups into his nineties; as of 2003, “Uncle Rulon” had married some seventy-five women and fathered at least sixty-five children. Although they view the United States as a satanic force, the fundamentalist residents of Colorado City are happy to accept welfare, and a third are on food stamps. But from a cultural point of view, fundamentalist Mormons are radically different from the vast majority of present-day Mormons, and as we’ll discuss later, their economic backwardness confirms the efficacy of the Triple Package (which fundamentalist Mormons lack).