The Triple Package (2 page)

THE TRIPLE PACKAGE

A
SEEMINGLY UN-
A
MERICAN FACT
about America today is that certain groups starkly outperform others. Some of America’s most successful groups won’t surprise you; others might.

What do the
current or recent CFOs or CEOs of American Express, Black & Decker, Citigroup, Dell, Fisher-Price, Deloitte, JetBlue, Marriott International, Sears, Roebuck, Huntsman, Skullcandy, Sam’s Club, and Madison Square Garden have in common? They are all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1980, it was
hard to find a Mormon on Wall Street. Today, Mormons are dominant players in America’s corporate boardrooms, investment firms, and business schools.

Mormons aren’t the only ones to rise out of nowhere. The
death of upward mobility in America has been widely reported in recent years. If you’re an American born after 1960, we’re told, how well you do is heavily dependent on how well your parents did. Overall this may be true, but the American Dream—including the old-fashioned
rags-to-riches version—is
very much alive for certain groups, particularly immigrants.
*

After 1959, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled to Miami,
most arriving destitute. Initially facing hostility—
NO DOGS, NO CUBANS
signs on rental buildings were common—they crammed into small apartments and became
dishwashers, janitors, and tomato pickers. These Cuban exiles, together with their children,
helped transform sleepy Miami into one of America’s most vibrant business centers. By 1990, the percentage of U.S.-born Cuban Americans with
household incomes over $50,000 was double that of Anglo-Americans. Although less than
4 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, Cuban Americans in 2002 accounted for
five of the top ten wealthiest Hispanics in the United States, and today are
two and a half times more likely than Hispanic Americans overall to be making over $200,000 a year.

In 2004,
two Harvard professors created an uproar when they pointed out that a majority of Harvard’s black students—possibly up to two-thirds—were immigrants or their children (as opposed to blacks whose families had been in America for many generations).
Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries—such as Jamaica, Haiti, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Liberia—are climbing America’s higher education ladder, but the most prominent are Nigerians.
A mere 0.7 percent of the U.S. black population, Nigerian Americans, most of them raised by hardworking, often struggling immigrant parents, account for
at least ten times that percentage of black students at America’s most elite universities and professional schools.
Predictably, this academic success has translated into economic success.
Nigerian Americans are already markedly overrepresented at Wall Street investment banks and blue-chip law firms.

Of course, who’s “successful” in America depends on how you define success. For some, the most successful life may be the one spent doing the most good. For others, it could be the life most devoted to God. For Socrates, wealth and prizes were but the false semblances of success; life
had to be examined to be worth living. But for reasons that could fill the pages of an entire library—or be sterilely reduced to the laws of supply and demand—goodness, religiosity, and self-awareness are not what modern economies reward. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. referred to
success “in its vulgar sense” as “the gaining of money and position” (and then went on to give advice about how to attain it). Later we’ll turn to the costs and narrowness of such success, but the stubborn question remains: Why do some groups rise in this “vulgar sense” while others don’t? And why do some groups simply outperform the rest?

Indian Americans have the highest income of any Census-tracked ethnic group, almost twice the national average.
Chinese, Iranian, and Lebanese Americans are not far behind. Asians are now so
overrepresented at Ivy League schools that they’re being called the “
new Jews,” and many believe that tacit quotas are being applied against them. It’s important to emphasize that
even the children of poor and poorly educated East Asian immigrants—Chinese seamstresses, Korean grocers, Vietnamese refugees—outperform other racial minority groups and their white American counterparts.

Meanwhile, the actual Jews continue to rack up
Nobel Prizes,
Pulitzer Prizes,
Tony Awards, and
hedge-fund billions at a rate wildly disproportionate to their numbers. In a nationwide study of young to middle-age adults, median American household net worth in 2004 was found to be $99,500;
among Jewish respondents, it was $443,000.
In 2009, although
just 1.7 percent of the adult population, Jews accounted for
twenty of
Forbes
’s top fifty richest Americans and over a third of the top four hundred.

Groups can also fall precipitously in their fortunes. In the early 1900s, when Max Weber wrote his classic
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
,
Protestants still dominated the American economy.
Today, American Protestants are below average in wealth, and being raised in an Evangelical or fundamentalist Protestant family is correlated with downward economic mobility.

—

T
HIS BOOK IS ABOUT
the rise and fall of groups. Its thesis is that when three distinct forces come together in a group’s culture, they propel that group to disproportionate success. Unfortunately, there’s a darker side to the story as well. The same forces that boost success also carry deep pathologies, and this book is about those pathologies too.

It turns out that for all their diversity, America’s overachieving groups are linked together by three cultural commonalities, each one of which violates a core tenet of modern American thinking. For lack of a less terrible name, we’ll call these three cultural forces, taken together, the Triple Package. Its elements are:

1. A SUPERIORITY COMPLEX.
This element of the Triple Package is the easiest to define: a deeply internalized belief in your group’s specialness, exceptionality, or superiority. This belief can derive from widely varying sources. It can be
religious, as in the case of Mormons. It can be rooted in a story about the
magnificence of your people’s history and civilization, as in the case of Chinese or Persians. It can be based on identity-defining social distinctions that most
Americans have never even heard of, such as descending from the “
priestly” Brahman caste, in the case of some Indian Americans, or belonging to the famously
entrepreneurial Igbo people, in the case of many Nigerian immigrants. Or it could be a mix. At their first Passover Seders, Jewish children hear that
Jews are the “chosen” people; later they will be taught that Jews are
a moral people, a people of law and intellect, a people of survivors.

A crucial point about the Superiority Complex is that it is antithetical to mainstream liberal thinking, which teaches us to refrain from judging any individual or any life to be better than another. Everyone is equal to everyone else. And if individual superiority judgments are frowned on, group superiority judgments are anathema. Group superiority is the stuff of racism, colonialism, imperialism, Nazism. Yet every one of America’s extremely successful groups fosters a belief in its own superiority.

2. INSECURITY.
As we will use the term, insecurity is a species of discontent—an anxious uncertainty about your worth or place in society, a feeling or worry that you or what you’ve done or what you have is in some fundamental way not good enough. Insecurity can take many different forms: a sense of being looked down on; a perception of peril; feelings of inadequacy; a fear of losing what one has. Everyone is probably insecure in one way or another, but some groups are more prone to it than others.
To be an immigrant is almost by definition to be insecure—an experience of deep economic and social anxiety, not knowing whether you can earn a living or give your children a decent life.

That insecurity should be a critical lever of success is another anathema, flouting the entire orthodoxy of contemporary popular and therapeutic psychology. Feelings of inadequacy are a
diagnostically
recognized symptom of personality disorder. If you’re insecure—if you feel that in some fundamental way you’re not good enough—then you lack self-esteem, and if you lack self-esteem, you aren’t on your way to a successful life. On the contrary, you should probably be in therapy. And the greatest anathema of all would be parents working to instill insecurity in their children. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s most successful groups, and these groups not only suffer from insecurity; they tend, consciously or unconsciously, to promote it.

Note that there’s a deep tension between insecurity and a superiority complex. It’s odd to think of people being simultaneously insecure but also convinced of their divine election or superiority. Yet this tense, unstable combination, as we’ll discuss shortly, is precisely what gives the Triple Package its potency.

3. IMPULSE CONTROL.
As we’ll use the term, impulse control refers to the ability to resist temptation, especially the temptation to give up in the face of hardship or quit instead of persevering at a difficult task. No society could exist without impulse control; as
Freud speculated, civilization may begin with the suppression of primal sexual and aggressive instincts. Nevertheless, against the background of a relatively permissive America, some groups decidedly place greater emphasis on impulse control than others.

Impulse control, too, runs powerfully against the grain of contemporary culture. The term “impulse control” conjures up all kinds of negative connotations: “control freaks,” people who are “too controlled” or “too controlling,” people who can’t be “impulsive” and enjoy life. People who control their impulses don’t live in the present, and living in the present is an imperative of modernity. Learning to live in the here and now is the lesson of countless books and feel-good movies, the key to overcoming inhibition and repression. Impulse
control is for adults, not for the young, and modern culture is above all a
youth culture.

As we increasingly disrespect old age and try to erase its very marks from our faces, we correspondingly romanticize childhood, imagining it as a time of what ought to be unfettered happiness, and we grow ever more fearful of spoiling that happiness through excessive restraints, demands, hardships, or discipline. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood and of impulse control in general, inculcating habits of discipline from an early age—or at least they did so when they were on the rise.

Because all three elements of the Triple Package run so counter to modern American culture, it makes sense that America’s successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another. It also makes sense that so many immigrant communities are pockets of exceptional upward mobility in an increasingly stratified American economy. Paradoxically, in modern America, a group has an edge if it doesn’t buy into—or hasn’t yet bought into—mainstream, post-1960s, liberal American principles.

—

W
HY IS THE
T
RIPLE
P
ACKAGE
so powerful an engine of group success? It begins with drive, generated by the unlikely convergence of the first two Triple Package forces.

You might think that a superiority complex and insecurity would be mutually exclusive, that it would be hard for these two qualities to coexist in a single individual. And that’s exactly the point: it
is
an odd and unstable combination. But this fusion of superiority and insecurity lies at the heart of every Triple Package culture, and together they tend to produce a goading chip on the shoulder, a need to prove oneself or be recognized.

Jews have had a chip of just this kind for basically all of recorded history—or at least since Hadrian, after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, barred Jews from entering Jerusalem and erected a
large marble pig outside the city gates. In America, the millions of poor Eastern European Jews who arrived in the early twentieth century, viewed as
filthy and degenerate not only by Gentiles but also by America’s German Jews as well, seemed, as one author puts it, “almost to wear a collective
chip on the shoulder.” The same could be said of the next generation: men like Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Clement Greenberg, Norman Podhoretz, and so many of the
New York intellectuals who grew up excluded from anti-Semitic bastions of education and culture but went on to become famous writers and critics.

This chip on the shoulder, this “I’ll show them” mentality, is a Triple Package specialty, the volatile product of a superiority complex colliding with a society in which that superiority is not acknowledged. It’s remarkable how common this dynamic is among immigrant groups: a minority, armed with enormous ethnocentric pride, suddenly finds itself disrespected and spurned in the United States. The result can border on resentment—and resentment, as
Nietzsche taught, is one of the world’s great motivators.

A particularly intense variant involves status collapse. Typically, immigrants to the United States are
moving up the economic ladder, achieving a better standard of living. In some cases, however, they experience the opposite: a
steep fall in status, wealth, or prestige—an especially bitter experience when their new society is wholly unaware of the respect they formerly commanded. Several of America’s most successful immigrant groups have suffered this additional sting. As we’ll discuss later, the Cuban Exiles offer a vivid example, and so too Iranian Americans.

Superiority and insecurity can combine to produce drive in a quite different but equally goading way: by generating a fierce, sometimes tormenting need to prove oneself not to “the world,” but within one’s own family.

In many Chinese, Korean, and South Asian immigrant families, parents impose exorbitantly
high academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”). Implicit in these expectations are both a deep assumption of superiority (we know you can do better than everyone else) and a needling suggestion of present inadequacy (but you haven’t done remotely well enough yet).
Comparisons to cousin X, who just graduated as valedictorian, or so-and-so’s daughter, who just got into Harvard, are common—and this is true in both
lower- and higher-income families.