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

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: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.