The "Triple Package" Explains Why Some Cultural Groups Are More Successful

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.'"

Comments

Simple enough...

[TWX]

...in that some feeling of superiority or supremacy for either the group that one hails from, be it family, community, race, whatever, gives one the belief that one can achieve, or can achieve more than others.

Feeling of inadequacy guilts one into taking action, to actually attempt to strive to meet that perceived superiority.

Impulse control prevents one from going for instant short-term benefits when those benefits are small, when one can see longer-term benefits by being willing to settle for something lesser now.

I'm not going to get into the racism and other unfortunate points of the argument, but it's not that surprising to me that those that feel that they can achieve will achieve, while those that don't feel that they can achieve won't, by the averages.

Re:Simple enough...

[chihowa]

The bad aspects of cultures should be changed, but it's touchy because it often gets ibnncorrectly equated to race.

I think that culture is deliberately equated to race by some to dismiss, without consideration, the idea that the disadvantages some people carry because of their culture are 1) repairable, by fixing the bad aspects of the culture, and 2) the fault of the members of the culture, by teaching these bad thought patterns and behaviors to their members.

It's far more appealing to these people to think that certain people are inferior/superior because of their race (the racist crowd) or that it's somehow everybody else's fault for the failure of certain cultures to prosper (the PC crowd). Equating culture to race allows us to not address the shortcomings in our different cultures and to shout down any attempt to even identify the shortcomings as racist.

Cultures may have strong correlation to race because distinct cultures were often developed by racially isolated groups of people. But cultures, and the individual behaviors and ideas contains within them, are portable to every group of people. We should be dissecting cultures to adopt the good aspects and shed the bad ones.

Re:Crazy!

[rmdingler]

There's another force at work.

Native kids, born into the complacency that is life in a wealthy western nation, often lack the drive wielded by those not too far removed from the have-not lifestyle afforded by life with fewer resources.

First generation immigrants are generally more motivated and productive compared to those farmed locally.

It'll work if you want to suceed

[Taco Cowboy]

When I arrived on the shore of America I had nothing.

I didn't even speak English.

To make the long story short - two of the three factors were very vital for my survival, and ultimately put me to where I am - except for the "superiority" factor, because I was less than a nothing back then.

As I grow more accustomed to the American lives, I get to know people from different cultures - for one reason or another, I find one group very very interesting - the Jews.

They are in so many ways so similar to the Chinese - and yet, they are far superior to the Chinese (yes, insecurity complex at play here) in that the Jews have a purpose in their own private lives and also for their community lives - on the other hand, most Chinese do not.

At the end of the day, the success of the Jews is not a fluke - their culture is structured in such a way that death of one member is nothing - even a massacre of millions to the Jews is nothing - as long as their culture gets to live on.

BBC has a very interesting program on the revival of Jewish culture in Krakow, Poland -
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...

What the Chinese have is number. What the Jews have is determination.

But other than that, in many other aspect in lives, what the Jews are can very much be found in the Chinese.

And I am not the only one who is saying this - read the following article (written by a Jew) to find out what he says ---

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/C...

Re:It'll work if you want to suceed

[Anonymous Coward]

and America's most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another

Okay but American blacks have NEVER felt like part of mainstream society and they are definitely the least prosperous group. That's a great big gaping hole in the theory that needs to be explained.

Having a culture that glorifies violence and street crime and actively persecutes those who want education really, really doesn't help. That's what gangsta culture does. No group could thrive with that. So the real question is why the nearly suicidal anti-achievement attitude? Where does it come from? Why can't people understand that embracing it means forever denying yourself your true protential? The successful black people who own businesses, enter the professions, and work in academia all have one thing in common: they rejected thug culture and growing up, they were often targeted and harasses and assaulted because of it. Not by whites, but by fellow American blacks.

Re:It'll work if you want to suceed

[dkleinsc]

When was the last time the Jews feel like they are the "mainstream" anywhere but in Israel ?

That's easy: 2014, in the United States. There are a lot of places in which being Jewish not only doesn't make you an outsider, it makes you the dominant religious group. You can find these places in nice neighborhoods in metropolitan New York City, around institutions of higher learning, and in the upper echelons of many businesses. Announcing that you're Jewish in the United States will typically garner about the same reaction as announcing that you're Baptist.

Jewish people in the US have not received anything close to the oppression that black people have, and I say that as someone who's part Jewish. Jewish Americans were not:
- effectively barred from living in most of the country.
- prevented from attending public schools and later institutions of higher learning, which allowed them to gain the skills they needed to succeed.
- paid less than their non-Jewish counterparts doing the same job.
- beaten or killed as a common recreational activity in large areas of the country, with police either ignoring it or actively supporting it.
- prevented from borrowing money from banks, which allowed them to buy homes and start businesses.
- targeted by America's current system of racial oppression called the "War on Drugs".

A big reason for this is that any white Jew (there are non-white Jews, but the vast majority are white) who doesn't do something to telegraph that they're Jewish can pretty easily blend in with other white people. This is obviously a benefit that Chinese and Indian immigrants didn't get, but it's real, and significant.

Success = happiness?

[pr0nbot]

Would you rather be successful and miserable, or a happy failure?

I'm told that Hawaii, for example, has an odd vibe where a lot of people lead frugal lives with clapped out cars and McJobs, but they're there because it's a wonderful place to live. Do they deserve contempt for their lack of ambition? Praise for their ability to value the things that really matter? Respect despite having chosen a path we might not choose for ourselves?

Re:Victimization will not get you anywhere ...

[dkleinsc]

I explained why: White Americans organized systems to keep black people from achieving the same success available to other ethnic minorities. I described a bunch of the systems that black people were and still are on the receiving end of that Jewish people (and, for that matter, Vietnamese people) never experienced in remotely similar numbers.

When you're in a rigged game, the most moral and capable person imaginable will still lose. The game of life was and continues to be rigged against black people. Why should there be any surprise that they don't have the same successes experienced by people who got to play by the same rules as everyone else?