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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.'"
...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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This piece of "outrage journalism" was "news" two weeks ago. /. regurgitating it? And why after waiting two weeks?
Why is
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
really the older one since he is the only one in school
tell him if he doesn't study and put an effort in that he is going to be kicked back to day care
This explains why my manager is a psycho :D
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I am a very successful (by most metrics. education, job security, networth, income, family, status/respect among the peers) Indian American. Any statistics about Indian Americans suffers from terrible sample bias. Almost all the Indian immigrants to USA fall into exactly two categories. 1. Highly educated (post grad + in India from top Indian universities, IITs, IIMs, IISc, AIIMSs, NITs, RECs, etc). 2. Emigres from Gujrat business communities. Both groups would be very successful wherever they go, not because of any of this triple package.
The Gujarati business community is world wide and they thrive in every corner of the world. A huge percentage of grocery stores, motels, retail stores and pawn shops in Africa, Caribbean and Pacific islands are owned by them, and they are making big inroads into USA, UK, Canada, New Zeland, Australia etc as their immigration polices are getting relaxed .
The educated Indians were bottled up in India, when it was pursuing socialistic policies. A small trickle of engineers and doctors from India in 1960s became a veritable torrent during 1990s. Stated with F1 student visa, and then H1B work visas. They are all college educated.
The achievements of Indian children in academics in the USA is not very much out place compared to the Whites, Jews, the African Americans or Chinese, if you draw a sample with same level of education/wealth from these communities.
This triple package theory does not explain why, despite being endowed with the triple package in the dyed in wool pristine form, India and Nigeria are so corrupt and so mired in poverty.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
All these, except impulse control, are strong indicators of an imbalanced and immature personality. These people are a problem. Their "success" is essentially of negative worth to society, and, I suspect, to themselves.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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?
I love that they made impulse control one of the three important characteristics. I think it's an important factor to be sure and one that really sets different people apart from each other.
Teenagers are famous for their lack of impulse control. Either it is my age showing or there really does seem to be an decrease of impulse control among American teens. It might be convenient to blame race for some of this... no, it really is easy when you look at the whole world instead of just what goes on in the U.S. But we're all human and we have a component of what we learn and are taught. Impulse control is 'behavior' and it comes largely from parenting.
The article highlights asian success who are also pretty famous for their parenting. Most people in the US find the style a bit restrictive to say the least and even distasteful. But the result speak for themselves do they not? And over the last few decades or more, there has been a constant stream of complaints by older people who keep talking about kids today and "family values" and parenting and all that. Mostly, this all falls on deaf ears of people who think they know better or that the old ways are no longer valid in "today's world."
And when you look at trending among different ethnicities in the US, where you see an increase in fatherless families or otherwise single parents you see more and more of these problems we call "impulse control" issues. (Back in the day, we said "criminal tendencies") But it's a bit sad and also gratifying that this story is not about what makes the white man in America successful. After all, the white man in America is the target of blame for other ethnicities' shortcomings. But I am glad this study points out that other non-white people can do better than white people and white people don't seem to be resentful or trying to take them down, let alone "keeping them down." (In fact, I would go so far as to say the white man is generally in awe of and are looking up to the successful asians.) So isn't it about time we stop listening to the complaints which even today continue to sound about the white man in America?
At he end of the day, each of us only have ourselves to blame for what we can and cannot do. (Within some reason of course.) But impulse control is huge. It's what affects the decisions and courses we take in life. I once or twice explained to my sons that life is a series of forks and paths. Some are mutually exclusive. When you make one choice, many other choices disappear. For example, getting a facial tattoo would close a LOT of doors in a person's future. (And those damned gauged earrings? Who, outside of a cannibalistic clan, would think that is acceptable in society?)
I have a sense of responsibility. I have this dark inner feeling that the things my family and especially my children do are a reflection on me. So I do what I can to ensure they reflect as well as possible. I hope my sons feel the same way as they go through life. It's a driving factor in family values. We need a lot more of this. No more single parents. No more running away from responsibility. Life isn't about whether or not you're happy any more. That's on you, but it's not on you to make another person's life worse because you're unhappy. That's a violation.
Hard to say. In his first sentence, Jim Goad used a four-letter word for female genitalia to describe Amy Chu. That may be his opinion, but it's not important outside his head. Starting the article that way did not create the impression that an insightful and well-reasoned analysis will follow. I quit reading.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
This is some serious racial/ethnic flame war fuel right here.
I would hazard a guess that many of the immigrants who come here are already motivated to do better, why else would they leave their home to come here? They aren't going to let their kids sit in front of a video game for hours when they busted their ass to relocate to another country and build a better future. They also want to make sure their kids are pushed into prestigious, high income jobs like business management, lawyers and doctors. You can't blame them for trying to ensure their kids are successful.
"Native" kids and their parents don't know the hardships such as poverty, disease or oppressive governments their immigrant parents experienced in their homeland. They take their comfortable life for granted and don't have the same motivation to succeed because they already feel successful. As long as they get to play video games, go out on a weekend to party and have enough money to pay rent and bills, they are satisfied. This usually happens around the second or third generation born here.
And as a side note:
You want to know the secret to success? Risk. Immigrants took a big risk to come here. Their kids will also take risks like starting a business or changing jobs at the drop of a hat for more pay. Of all the people I know, the ones who are successful are the ones who took risks career wise and went into business or made major job/career changes.
The wording of the first two traits is strong, and easily misinterpreted, like mistaking humility with being a pushover. "Superiority complex" might be better rendered as "the knowledge one can do better than this"; "insecurity" is crippling compared to "the sense that the present condition is unttnable")
I'll add one last one to the trio though: "fails often" or rather, being able to recognize that failure is a milestone in an endeavour, not a gravestone; failure is a better teacher than success. This concept is alive and well amongst entrepreneurs of all cultures, and is essential to not erode the forward drive offered by the "superiority complex."
The ability to digest one's own failure is also an essential trait to continue to foster curiosity and experimentation - an ability easily lost in our obsession of being right first time, embodied by our acceptance of "do or do not, there is no try."
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
The maturity of the article, combined with the vulgar name calling and his own admission that he did not read the book, makes me question anything he has to say. A quick search shows his penchant for beating people up and getting himself incarcerated, none of which particularly helps his case.
In contrast, Amy and Jed are both Yale professors, and if nothing else, their hypotheses are backed up by some semblance of data.
He also employs sheer hyperbole in interpreting the piece:
If he had read the piece, he'd have read the following:
So yeah, I don't think the word "salient" really applies here. He's nothing more than a dimwit troll, and his language, demeanor, and reading skills only highlight that.
The one difference between the Jews and the so-called "black people" is that the Jews do not dwell on how oppressed they were, in the hand of the others.
Holy crap! Its a part of their culture. Listen to a few of the last generation's Jewish comedians. Its true that many younger US Jews don't buy into the whole victim psychology like their elders did. But there is an active propaganda campaign generated in Israel to continually remind the diaspora of their past suffering and, oh yea, keep sending that money and voting the homeland's political interests. So you'll all have someplace to go when 'they' turn on us again.
Other nationalities and races don't have to put up with the same crap that blacks still do. Jim Crow laws were still in place within the lifetimes of many African Americans. And there is still a racist movement in this country that keeps the propaganda going. Jews, Vietnamese and others have an internal meme of their oppression. Blacks keep having it shoved on them from the outside. And that's the primary difference between the success/failure of their groups within this country.
Have gnu, will travel.
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?
I am officially gone from