Why Minorities Succeed

The triple package of success
Three cultural factors explain the success of ethnic and cultural minorities in American society: a belief that the group one belongs to is exceptional; a goading sense of inferiority; and impulse control.

By Amy Chua And Jed Rubenfeld, Published The Straits Times, 31 Jan 2014

A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well.

Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly US$90,000 or S$115,000 per year in median household income versus US$50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top jobs in many of the most recognisable US companies.

Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 per cent of the adult population in the US, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.

Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents' socioeconomic or educational background.

Take New York City's selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders.

For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardised entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.

Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others - as measured by income, test scores and so on - is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.

There are some black and Hispanic groups that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana and Haiti, are climbing America's higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians.

Nigerians make up less than 1 per cent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry.

Cuban-Americans in Miami rose in one generation from widespread penury to relative affluence.Meanwhile, some Asian- American groups - Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example - are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.

Most fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of Wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elites have been declining for decades.

In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 - including a 63-point edge over whites - a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.

Three traits for success

IT TURNS out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in the United States today share three traits that, together, propel success.

The first is a superiority complex - a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite - insecurity, a feeling that you or what you've done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

It's odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior and insecure. Yet it's precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control - the ability to resist temptation - and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.

Ironically, each element of the triple package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.

We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America's most successful groups tells itself that it's exceptional in a deep sense. Mormons believe they are "gods in embryo" placed on Earth to lead the world to salvation; they see themselves, in the historian Claudia Bushman's words, as "an island of morality in a sea of moral decay".

Middle East experts and many Iranians explicitly refer to a Persian "superiority complex". At their first Passover Seders, most Jewish children hear that Jews are the "chosen" people.

That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in US culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America's rising groups.

A central finding in a study of over 5,000 immigrants' children led by sociologist Ruben Rumbaut was how frequently the kids felt "motivated to achieve" because of an acute sense of obligation to redeem their parents' sacrifices.

By contrast, white American parents are found to be more focused on building children's social skills and self-esteem.

In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-Americans reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.

Plus, being an outsider in a society - and America's most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another - is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life's precariousness to their children.

Cubans fleeing to Miami after Fidel Castro's takeover reported seeing signs reading "No dogs, no Cubans" on apartment buildings. During the 2012 election cycle, Mormons had to hear presidential candidate Mitt Romney's clean-cut sons described as "creepy" in the media.

Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well.

Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don't live in the moment. The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children's happiness with excessive restraints or demands.

By contrast, every one of America's most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age - or at least they did so when they were on the rise.

In isolation, each of these three qualities would be insufficient. Alone, a superiority complex is a recipe for complacency; mere insecurity could be crippling; impulse control can produce asceticism. Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the "longing to rise".

Flip side of success

BUT this success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies. Impulse control can undercut the ability to experience beauty, tranquillity and spontaneous joy. Insecure people feel like they're never good enough. "I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents," recalls the novelist Amy Tan. "It's a horrible feeling."

Recent studies suggest that Asian-American youth have greater rates of stress (but, despite media reports to the contrary, lower rates of suicide).

A superiority complex can be even more invidious. Group supremacy claims have been a source of oppression, war and genocide throughout history.

Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning - precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.

The good news is that it's not some magic gene generating these groups' disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old "education culture" that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone. The way to develop this package of qualities - not that it's easy, or that everyone would want to - is through grit.

It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn't ethnically or religiously exclusive. It's the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.

The US itself was born a triple package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America's animals were bigger than Europe's) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.

But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was America's superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fuelling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification. Thus the trials of recent years - the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China - have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.

Those who talk of America's "decline" miss this crucial point. America has always been at its best when it has had to overcome adversity and prove its mettle on the world stage. For better and worse, it has that opportunity again today.

The writers are professors at Yale Law School and the authors of the forthcoming book The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain The Rise And Fall Of Cultural Groups in America.

Amy Chua is the author of the controversial book on parenting, Battle Hymn Of A Tiger Mother, published in 2001. Jed Rubenfeld is her husband.

This is excerpted from a longer article in the New York Times.

Tiger Mother fights back
Author Amy Chua says critics of her new book have twisted her words
By Akshita Nanda, The Straits Times, 4 Feb 2014

Amy Chua aka "Tiger Mother" is ducking readers' claws again. The Yale law professor made headlines in 2011 for her memoir of authoritarian parenting Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother, and her new book, The Triple Package, written with husband Jed Rubenfeld, is being slammed as racist in early reviews.

The Triple Package, out today, looks at why some minority racial or religious groups in the United States, such as Jews, Asians, immigrant Africans or Mormons, deliver more CEOs or entrepreneurs or best-selling writers than the national average.

The authors put this down to three factors or a "triple package" which fuels a powerful drive to succeed: Members of these minorities have a sense of superiority instilled about the culture they inherit, a feeling of insecurity about their position in society and the ability to delay gratification and persevere in the face of tremendous odds.

A third of the 320-page volume is taken up by around 1,000 end-notes detailing how the authors arrived at their theories. However, the singling out of certain cultural groups has clearly touched a nerve in America, where race remains a hot-button issue.

In a telephone interview from her home in Connecticut, Chua, 52, says the book has been misunderstood. "It's horrible, it's like deja vu all over again. It's very upsetting. All these people talking about it and they haven't even seen it."

In a New York Post article last month, reviewer Maureen Callahan compared The Triple Package with Chua's best-selling 2011 memoir Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother and alleged that both books endorse the idea that some races are superior to others.

Of The Triple Package, she wrote: "It's a series of shock-arguments wrapped in self-help tropes and it's meant to do what racist arguments do: scare people."

But Chua hits back at the article, saying: "This book is the opposite of what the New York Post says. This superiority thing, people are getting it so mixed up. We say that many groups have a sense of exceptionality but we never say some groups are superior. It's like the media blending these words, it's totally backward.

"Some groups are doing well now but it changes over time."

Listening in to part of the interview, Rubenfeld, 55, adds: "It's a fact that some groups are doing better in some ways. It can't be that we're not allowed to talk about this. We won't be able to understand the world and what it takes to survive in the modern economy if we don't talk about it."

In a commentary published in Time magazine, creator and chief blogger of the Careerist Vivia Chen said as much, saying that Chua's new book has made many people nervous because many Americans are uncomfortable about talking about race and success.

Some readers have made much of the fact that Chua and Rubenfeld are from the groups that their book says are most successful in America. Rubenfeld is Jewish. His late father was a psychologist and his mother an art critic. Rubenfeld is a professor at Yale Law School like his wife and also writes historical mysteries which are occasionally bestsellers.

The Triple Package arose from their conversations about how two people from such different backgrounds could end up roughly having the same career. "Jed was raised totally differently than I was. His parents were 1960s liberal, all 'pursue your passion'," says Chua, whose immigrant Chinese parents are her sternest critics. Her father was a professor of engineering at the University of California (Berkley) and her mother a housewife.

"Even now when I go give a book talk, everyone will say: 'You're amazing'. My mum will say: 'You were good, but you spoke a little fast'. She's the only one telling me the truth."

Four years ago, Chua was a little-known academician with two scholarly works to her credit, one on the great empires of the past, Day Of Empire (2007), and World On Fire (2002), which looked at countries where ethnic minorities were far wealthier than the average and how this could lead to conflict.

Then the strains of family life led her to pour her heart out about her parenting experience in late 2010.

"I wrote Tiger Mum in three months when my daughter rebelled, my sister got sick, she had leukaemia," she says, recalling how younger daughter Louisa threw a tantrum at a restaurant and forced her to rethink her parenting regimen.

Most readers ignore the book's long subtitle which she says put her authoritarian parenting methods in persepctive.

"This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory and how I was humbled by a 13-year-old."

The culprit, she says, is a January 2011 extract published in the Wall Street Journal and titled Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.

When the book finally came out, many readers tore it apart and accused her of cruelty and child abuse.

Among the examples cited by reviewers were that daughters Sophia and Louisa were not allowed to sleep over at friends' houses or get any grade less than an A.

Today, Louisa, 18, is applying to Ivy League Schools. Sophia, 21, is in Harvard, and maintains a "tiger cub" blog where she often states her affection for her parents.

"It just rebuts all these stereotypes that if you have strict parents, you become shy and robotic," says Chua. "I don't think it's so bad to have high expectations. My parents unconditionally loved me, a lot of Westerners just can't see that. By having high expectations of me, they said: 'You are amazing, you can do anything - you just haven't done it yet'."

As Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother hit the bestseller charts - selling close to 21,000 copies in Singapore alone - Time magazine published a cover story querying whether "tiger parenting" was responsible for the rise in Asia, academics began researching differences in parenting styles between Asian-Americans and other groups - studies mentioned in The Triple Package - while Chua found herself alternately being reviled in e-mail and becoming a celebrity at Chinese restaurants.

"It's very strange," she says with a laugh. "At school, if you ask students, I'm well known for being really supportive and nurturing. This reputation for being scary, controlling, to a lot of people who know me, it's a strange public persona."

Both Chua and Rubenfeld insist that The Triple Package is not a follow-up book, or a how-to or parenting guide. Yet they realise many readers might take it that way. "That's kind of what happened with Tiger Mum," says Chua. "It wasn't a how-to book but people said: 'Oh my God, she got her daughter into Harvard, what do I do?'"

Neither of them is too worried, since the book does point out the dangers of America's present culture of glorifying instant gratification rather than old-school perseverance.

Rubenfeld says: "One of the takeaway points is that in Western countries, we're going to have to find ways to reward good, old-fashioned hard work and perseverance. It's just become difficult for people to see that old-fashioned values like that will be rewarded."

Chua adds: "I think to say it's cultural or something any family can do should not be that controversial. It's not racial (sic) to say that certain groups right now are doing better than others. There's a knee-jerk reaction, people say: 'You're talking about groups, it's got to be stereotyping.' That's just silly.

"I just hope the book, after it gets read, will be less controversial. I think it'll be like Tiger Mum. A lot of people who were so angry at me after the Wall Street Journal headline, after they read the book, they said: 'This is totally different from what I thought'. So that's kind of what I'm hoping will happen now."

“We say that many groups have a sense of exceptionality but we never say some groups are superior. It’s like the media blending these words, it’s totally backward.”

Amy Chua on her new book The Triple Package, which she wrote with husband Jed Rubenfeld

Related

What Drives Success?

Confessions of a Tiger Couple