The Triple Package (24 page)

For example, in response to overwhelming evidence that America’s math and science skills are plummeting, putting our innovation lead at serious risk, one school of thought has become bizarrely influential: the one that says—hey, don’t worry, the solution for America is to do less, not more. In a widely read recent piece on the secret to innovation, the author implored American parents to let their kids “do less,” surf the Internet, “drifting from fad to fad, website to website,” and just “follow their passions,” adding pointedly: “
Remember that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college to follow their passions.”

This is the Disney version—the instant gratification version—of creativity and learning (as when Pocahontas “looks into her heart” and can suddenly speak English). American kids already spend seven to eight hours daily
on entertainment media and
25 percent more time watching television than in school. The core of wisdom in the “do less,” “just follow your passions” view is that it’s hard to succeed unless you love what you do. But this view conveniently forgets that real achievement and real creativity—whether artistic, professional, or entrepreneurial—requires as much drive and grit as inspiration. Asked about the qualities required to get through medical school, the novelist and physician Khaled Hosseini answered, “
Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. . . . Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as a fact of life.” Asked about the qualities required to be a novelist, he said, “Ditto.”

Gates and Zuckerberg—not to mention Steve Jobs—were among the hardest-working, most driven people their peers knew. Obviously creativity also requires the freedom to question and challenge authority (which is why China has so far trailed us in inventiveness), the space to wonder and free-associate. But the fact remains that you can’t invent
Google, Facebook, or the iPod unless you’ve mastered the basics, are willing to put in long hours, and can pick yourself off the floor when life knocks you down the first ten times.

The next string theory may well hit someone as they’re strolling on the beach, but you can be sure that person will have known his quantum physics—and banged his head for years against the equations he’s about to throw out the window. (Picasso and Mondrian were masters of painterly technique before they invented forms of painting no one had seen before.) The real prescription for groundbreaking innovation and entrepreneurialism is the Triple Package
ladder.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon when he was “dead broke” in 1995, committing himself—and his venture capital investors—to plow every penny of return back into the company for a minimum of five years. He kept his word; the rest is history. Thus the birth of one-click shopping depended on a consummate act of impulse control.

None of which is to say that the Triple Package will make you happy. If in fact successful people tend to feel both superior and inadequate, then success to some extent necessarily implies a trade-off with
happiness. Feeling like you’re not good enough is painful. But a life that doesn’t include hard-won accomplishment and triumph over obstacles may not be a satisfying one. There is something deeply fulfilling, even thrilling, in doing almost anything difficult extremely well. There is a joy and pride that come from pushing yourself to another level, or across a new frontier.

A life devoted only to the present—to feeling good in the now—is unlikely to deliver real fulfillment.
The present moment by itself is too small, too hollow. We all need a future, something beyond and greater than our own present gratification, at which to aim or to which we feel we’ve contributed. Happiness, wrote the Austrian psychologist (and Holocaust survivor) Victor Frankl, “cannot be pursued; it must ensue . . . as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.” The Triple Package doesn’t promise a meaningful life, but it makes such a life possible, because it allows people to seize the reins of time—to live not only in the present but also for the future, to devote their full capacities to changing themselves or the world, in small ways or large.

At the end of the day, the Triple Package is a form of empowerment, which can be used for selfish gain or for others’ good alike. People who have it are not guaranteed anything, and they run the risk of real pathologies. But they are in a position to transform their own and others’ lives.

—

T
O BE SURE,
calling for America to recover its Triple Package creates a paradox. For if America’s Triple Package rests on a superiority of tolerance, opportunity, and equality, then the success of the
nation’s
Triple Package will always be in tension with that of its Triple Package
groups
. To one degree or another, the superiority complex of every Triple Package group is almost by definition intolerant. Hence America’s Triple Package will conflict with and tend to undercut the superiority complexes of its Triple Package groups. Ironically, this conflict will ensure that America’s Triple Package groups remain cultural outsiders to some extent—at least for the first or second generation—which will in turn assist their Triple Package (by giving them insecurity), boosting their success.

In the long run, however, the American national Triple Package will be too strong for these group chauvinisms. It will consume them all. The real promise of a Triple Package America is the promise of a day when there are no longer any successful groups in the United States—only successful individuals.

Our parents, Leon and Diana Chua and Sy and Florence Rubenfeld, were inspirations for this book.

We are deeply grateful to our friends, family members, and colleagues Bruce Ackerman, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Tony Kronman, Nancy Greenberg, Henry Hansmann, Marina Santilli, Daniel Markovits, Sarah Bilston, Ian Ayres, Jennifer Brown, John Morley, Erin Morley, David Grewal, Jordan Smoller, Alexis Contant, Sylvia Austerer, Michelle Chua, Viktor Rubenfeld, and Katrin Chua, all of whom provided brilliant criticisms of earlier drafts of this book. We also profited enormously from conversations with Elizabeth Alexander, Susan Birke-Fiedler, James Bundy, Adam Cohen, Anne Dailey, Steve Ecker, Paul Fiedler, Jin Li, and Anne Tofflemire. Special thanks to Ademola Adewale-Sadik, Nabiha Syed, Hal Boyd, Damaris Walker, Tom and Keya Dannenbaum, the Rawls family, and the Swett family for their detailed comments on specific sections of the book.

Some of the key ideas in this book were first developed in a 2008 Yale Law seminar called “Law and Prosperity,” and thanks are due to the following remarkable students for the insights they provided during this book’s formative stages: Ligia Abreu, Yaw Anim, Monica Bell, Bridge Colby, Jacqueline Esai, Ronan Farrow, Jon Finer, Jim Ligtenberg, Patricia Moon, Nick Pyati, Amelia Rawls, Ben Taibleson, Lina Tetelbaum, Natalia Volosin, Shenyi Wu, and David Zhou. We also owe a great debt to the indomitable Jeffrey Lee, who saved us from embarrassments we can’t describe.

We couldn’t have written this book without an amazing group of research assistants. In particular, we’d like to thank Halley Epstein, Tian Huang, Rebecca Jacobs, Christine Tsang, Jordana Confino, Stephanie Lee, Ida Araya Brumskine, Bert Ma, Rich Tao, and Meng Jia Yang, each of whom devoted dozens, in some cases hundreds, of hours to this book, as well as Sam Adelsberg, Casey Arnold, Justin Lo, Renagh O’Leary, Vidya Satchit, Wanling Su, Avi Sutton, J. D. Vance, Ryan Watzel, and Eileen Zelek. In addition, the following students provided critical assistance on particular chapters: Jasmeet Ahuja, Barrett Anderson, Matt Andrews, Ariela Anhalt, Josef Ansorge, Nana Akua Antwi-Ansorge, Amar Bakshi, Rachel Bayefsky, Megan Browder, Walker Brumskine, Christine Buzzard, Kathryn Cherry, Usha Chilukuri, Celia Choy, Charlie Dameron, Bicky David, Rachel Dempsey, Alley Edlebi, James Eimers, Aditi Eleswarapu, Arthur Ewenczyk, Adele Faure, David Felton, James Flynn, Yousef Gharbieh, Dana Stern Gibber, Noah Greenfield, Natalie Hausknecht, Stephanie Hays, Daniel Herz-Roiphe, Maya Hodis, Jane Jiang, Lora Johns, Tassity Johnson, Nathan Hake, Diane Kane, Jesse Kaplan, Sam Kleiner, Robert Klipper, Harrison Korn, Philipp Kotlaba, Doug Lieb, Ming-Yee Lin, Dermot Lynch, Sarah Magen, Nick McLean, Jennifer McTiernan, Dahlia Mignouna, Yannick Morgan, Erica Newland, Luke Norris, Aileen Nowlan, Ifeanyi Victor Ojukwu, Jonathan Ross-Harrington, Emily Schofield, Conrad Scott, Reema Shah, Sopen Shah, Lochlan Shelfer, James Shih, Jon Siegel, Matthew Sipe, Alex Taubes, Caitlin Tully, Chas Tyler, Anna Vinnik, John Wei, Luci Yang, Justin Zaremby, and Ben Zweifach.

Michael VanderHeijden and especially the spectacular Sarah Kraus of the Yale Law Library awed us with their energy and resourcefulness; they have our great admiration and gratitude. We’d also like to thank Patricia Spiegelhalter, Karen Williams, and Rosanna Gonsiewski for their assistance and support.

Our love and thanks to Sophia and Louisa Chua-Rubenfeld for their patience, insights, and sometimes scathing editorial critiques.

Finally, we are deeply indebted to our extraordinary agents Tina Bennett and Suzanne Gluck, to Ben Platt, Sarah Hutson, and the entire team at Penguin, and most of all, to our brilliant editor, Ann Godoff, who understood what we were trying to say in this book better than anyone.

CHAPTER 1: THE TRIPLE PACKAGE

current or recent CFOs or CEOs
:
Jeff Benedict,
The Mormon Way of Doing Business: How Nine Western Boys Reached the Top of Corporate America
(New York and Boston: Business Plus, 2007), pp. ix–xii; James Crabtree, “The Rise of a New Generation of Mormons,”
Financial Times
, July 9, 2010; Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling,
Mormon America: The Power and the Promise
(New York: HarperOne, 2007), pp. 137–43; “The Mormon Way of Business,”
The Economist
, May 5, 2012; “The List: Famous Mormons,”
Washington Times
, Oct. 21, 2011; Caroline Winter, “God’s MBAs: Why Mormon Missions Produce Leaders,”
Business Week
, June 9, 2011; “Mormons in Business,” Businessweek.com, June 9, 2011; see also Matthew Bowman,
The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith
(New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 223–5 (noting Mormon success in politics and business); Claudia L. Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America
(Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2006), p. 187 (noting the growing success of Mormons in finance, corporations, law, and government).

hard to find a Mormon on Wall Street
:
Crabtree, “The Rise of a New Generation of Mormons.”

death of upward mobility
:
See, e.g., Timothy Noah, “The Mobility Myth,”
The New Republic
, Feb. 8, 2012; Josh Sanburn, “The Loss of Upward Mobility in the U.S.,”
Time
, Jan. 5, 2012; Rana Foroohar, “What Ever Happened to Upward Mobility?,”
Time
, Nov. 14, 2011.

very much alive for certain groups, particularly immigrants
:
See Pew Research Center,
Second-Generation Americans: A
Portrait of the Adult Children of Immigrants
(Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, Feb. 7, 2013), p. 7; Julia B. Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations,” in Julia B. Isaacs, Isabel V. Sawhill, and Ron Haskins,
Getting Ahead or Losing
Ground: Economic Mobility in America
(Washington, DC: Economic Mobility Project, The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2008), pp. 15, 17–19; Ron Haskins, “Immigration: Wages, Education, and Mobility,” in Issacs et al.,
Getting
Ahead or Losing Ground
, pp. 81, 86–7; Richard Alba and Victor Nee,
Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration
(Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 240, 242, 244–5; Renee Reichl Luthra and Roger Waldinger, “Intergenerational Mobility,” in David Card and Steven Raphael, eds.,
Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic
Inequality
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), pp. 169, 183, 201; see also Rubén G. Rumbaut, “Paradise Shift: Immigration, Mobility, and Inequality in Southern California,” Working Paper No. 14 (Austrian Academy of Sciences, October 2008), p. 37 (summarizing a study that showed enormous differences across different immigrant groups but noting that “compared to their parents, all groups show inter-generational educational progress”).

findings do not apply to “immigrant families”
:
Isaacs et al., “Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations,” p. 6. Chapter 7 will address the American upward mobility data and the exclusion of immigrants in more detail.

most arriving destitute
:
See Miguel Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
(Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 20–1, 35–7; Guillermo J. Grenier and Lisandro Pérez,
The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States
(Boston: Pearson Education, 2003), p. 48.

NO DOGS, NO CUBANS
:
Interview with José Pico, director and president, JPL Investments Corp., in Miami, Fla. (conducted by Eileen Zelek on Jan. 6, 2012) (on file with authors); see also Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
, p. 37.

dishwashers, janitors, and tomato pickers
:
María Cristina García,
Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p. 20; Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
, p. 36.

helped transform sleepy Miami
:
Grenier and Pérez,
The Legacy of Exile
, pp. 46–7.

household incomes over $50,000 was double that of Anglo-Americans
:
See Kevin A. Hill and Dario Moreno, “Second-Generation Cubans,”
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences
18 (1996), pp.
175, 177.

4 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population
:
U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile (2010 3-year dataset) (population group codes 400- Hispanic; 403–Cuban).

five of the top ten wealthiest
:
See “Magazine Publishes List of Richest U.S. Latinos,” HispanicBusiness.com, May 8, 2002, http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/news/newsbyidfront.asp?id 6775.

two and a half times more likely
:
U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table DP03: Selected Economic Characteristics (2010 5-year dataset)(population group code 403 – Cuban) (4 percent of Cuban American households had annual incomes over $200,000); ibid., Table DP03: Selected Economic Characteristics (2010 5-year dataset)(ethnic group 400 – Hispanic or Latino) (1.6 percent of Hispanic American households had annual incomes over $200,000).

two Harvard professors
:
Sara Rimer and Karen W. Arenson, “Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?,”
New York Times
, June 24, 2004.

Immigrants from many West Indian and African
:
Douglas S. Massey, Margarita Mooney, Kimberly C. Torres, and Camille Z. Charles, “Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States,”
American Journal of Education
113 (2007), pp. 243, 249–50.

A mere 0.7 percent of the U.S. black population
:
U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 004 – Black or African American) (38,463,510); ibid. (population group code 567 – Nigerian) (260,724).

at least ten times
:
Nigerians already made up about 4.6 percent of the black freshmen at selective American universities in 1999, when they represented about .48 percent of the U.S. black population. See Massey et al., “Black Immigrants,” pp. 248, 251 (immigrants accounted for 27 percent of black freshmen at selective universities, and Nigerians made up 17 percent of immigrant black freshmen). As we indicate in chapter 2, Nigerian overrepresentation at top American schools appears to be greater—perhaps significantly greater—today.

Nigerian Americans are already markedly overrepresented
:
Nigerians appear to be overrepresented at America’s top law firms by a factor of at least seven, compared to their percentage of the U.S. black population as a whole. Study commissioned by authors, July/August, 2013. For more detail, see chapter 2. See also Patricia Ngozi Anekwe,
Characteristics and Challenges of High
Achieving Second-Generation Nigerian Youths in the United States
(Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers, 2008), p. 129 (quoting an interviewee who said that Nigerians “dominate” investment banking).

had to be examined to be worth living
:
Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds.,
The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 23 (
Apology,
38a).

success “in its vulgar sense”
:
Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Ralph Waldo Emerson
, in
The Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes,
vol. 11 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co, 1892), p. 201.

Indian Americans have the highest income
:
U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 013 – Asian Indian) (estimating median Indian household income of $90,525 as compared to $51,222 for U.S. population overall).

Chinese, Iranian, and Lebanese Americans
:
U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group codes 016 – Chinese; 540 – Iranian; 509 – Lebanese) (estimating median household income of approximately $68,000 for Iranian Americans and $67,000 for Chinese and Lebanese Americans).

overrepresented at Ivy League schools
:
Arthur Sakamoto, Kimberly A. Goyette, and Chang Hwan Kim, “Socioeconomic Attainments of Asian Americans,”
Annual Review of Sociology
35 (2009), pp. 255, 256; Ron Unz, “The Myth of American Meritocracy,”
The American Conservative
, Nov. 28, 2012.

“new Jews,” and
 . . . tacit quotas:
See Unz, “The Myth of American Meritocracy.”

even the children of poor and poorly educated East Asian immigrants
:
See, e.g., Laurence Steinberg,
Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 83, 88; Min Zhou,
Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), pp. 224–5; Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee, “Frames of Achievement and Opportunity Horizons,” in Card and Raphael,
Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality
, pp. 206, 210–2, 215–6; Rumbaut, “Paradise Shift,” p. 12; see also Margaret A. Gibson, “The School Performance of Immigrant Minorities: A Comparative View,”
Anthropology and Education Quarterly
18, no. 4 (Dec. 1987), pp. 262–75 (focusing on children of lower-income Punjabi Sikhs); Alba and Nee
, Remaking the American Mainstream
, p. 240 (noting that the children of often illiterate Hmong immigrants “nevertheless achieve high grades”).

Nobel Prizes
:
Raphael Patai,
The Jewish Mind
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), pp. 342, 547–8 (documenting that between 1901 and 1994 Jews, while “less than half a percent of mankind,” won 35 percent of the Nobel Prizes for Economics, 27 percent for Physiology and Medicine, 22 percent for Physics, and 20 percent of Nobel Prizes overall).

Pulitzer Prizes
:
Steven L. Pease,
The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement
(Sonoma, CA: Deucalion, 2009), p. viii, table 1 (Jews have won 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction, 13 percent for fiction).

Tony Awards
:
Stewart F. Lane,
Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers
(Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2011), p. 190 (69 percent of Tony-winning composers have been Jewish).

hedge-fund billions
:
Nathan Vardi, “The 40 Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers,”
Forbes
, March 1, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/lists/2012/hedge-fund-managers-12_land.html.

among Jewish respondents, it was $443,000
:
Lisa A. Keister,
Faith and Money: How Religion Contributes to Wealth and Poverty
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 86 and Table 4.1.

just 1.7 percent of the adult population
:
Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life,
U.S. Religious Landscape Survey—Religious Affiliation: Diverse and Dynamic
(Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2008) p. 8.

twenty of
Forbes
’s top
:
Jacob Berkman, “At Least 139 of the Forbes 400 are Jewish,” October 5, 2009, http://www.jta.org/2009/10/05/fundermentalist/at-least-139-of-the-forbes-400-are-jewish.

Protestants still dominated
:
Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 35.

Today, American Protestants
:
Lisa A. Keister,
Getting Rich: America’s New Rich and How They Got That Way
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 164–7, 172; see also Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life,
U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,
p. 60 (13 percent of Evangelical Protestants make $100,000 a year or more, as compared to 18 percent of the total population, 15 percent of Protestants in America generally, 43 percent of Hindu Americans, and 46 percent of Jewish Americans).

religious, as in the case of Mormons
:
Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, p. 3; Terryl L. Givens,
People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. xiii, xvi; Jan Shipps,
Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 125.

magnificence of your people’s history
:
See, e.g., Kenneth M. Pollack,
The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America
(New York: Random House, 2004), p. 3; Robert Graham,
Iran: The Illusion of Power
(London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 190–2; John K. Fairbank, “China’s Foreign Policy in Historical Perspective,”
Foreign Affairs
47, no. 3 (April 1969), pp. 449, 456; Q. Edward Wang, “History, Space, and Ethnicity: The Chinese Worldview,”
Journal of World History
10, no. 2 (Fall 1999), pp. 285, 287–8.

“priestly” Brahman caste
:
Ramesh Bairy T.S.,
Being Brahmin, Being Modern: Exploring the Lives of Caste Today
(London, New York, and New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), pp. 87, 280–1; Louis Dumont,
Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 79–80; see also Narendra Jadhav,
Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Escape from India’s Caste System
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 1, 4.