The "Triple Package" Explains Why Some Cultural Groups Are More Successful 397
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Yale Law School professors Amy Chua, the self-proclaimed 'Tiger Mom,' and her husband Jed Rubenfeld write in the NYT that it may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall and Chua and Rubenfeld claim to have identified the three factors that account some group's upward mobility. 'It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success,' write Chua and Rubenfeld. '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.' Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking. For example, that insecurity should be a lever of success is anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy and parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America's rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children. 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. Hence the common credo: They can take away your home or business, but never your education, so study harder. 'The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsized belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control,' conclude Chua and Rubenfeld adding that prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. '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...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.'"
Re:Yawn..... (Score:4, Informative)
Seems like a blinding flash of the obvious, in a lot of ways
You haven't read their follow up paper, wherein we learn that spending all your time stoned on pot and alcohol correlates with low achievement in life.
Re:What about the 4th & 5th? (Score:2, Informative)
Not required. Talent is a hindrance for success in the US. Obsessive-compulsion are a plus though. And "hard work"? You know that quantity cannot make up for quality, right? Well, as far as "success" goes, it does, but only on the surface.
Amy Chua is getting old (Score:2, Informative)
I'm really tired of hearing about these narcissistic masturbatory fantasies that this bitch advocates. First you try to say that Chinese tiger moms are superior. Well guess what, Ms Chua, That's the mentality that produced the culture of your ancestral homeland, an overpopulated pile of shit, where the ultra rich shit on the poor and the poor shit on each other, serve each other poisoned milk, and rat meat cooked in arsenic laced recycled ditch oil, and let two year old babies die in the street because they couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone. Wow, what a superior culture, I'm so envious. You married an American, who was likely a much higher caliber guy than you could have even dreamed of getting had you married a Chinese man, no doubt making you the envy of all your relatives and friends. But now you want to play both sides of the fence and tell Americans that it's your superior cultural heritage that will make you and your children great successes in life. Seriously? Oh, I see now... He's not just a regular American, he's _Jewish_ American, so he is superior too. Sorry honey, you're just an overachieving narcissist. Your brand of child rearing is just what comes naturally to narcissist, and your attempts to dress it up are pathetic. Once your kids realize what an unempathetic selfish bitch you are, and they realize that your love for them is directly proportional to the amount of glory that they bring you, while other kids' parents just loved them as they were, then they'll just abandon you when you're old, as they should.