The Triple Package (4 page)

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T
HROUGHOUT THIS BOOK
we’ll be referring to Triple Package cultures and Triple Package groups, but to avoid any misunderstanding, we want to emphasize two important points.

First, a Triple Package culture will not produce the qualities we’ve described—a sense of superiority, a chip on the shoulder, a capacity to endure hardship, and so on—in all its members. It doesn’t have to in order to produce group success; it just has to do better than average. In 1941, baseball great Ted Williams got a hit only 4 times out of every 10 at-bats, but because the average Major Leaguer gets a hit about
2.6 times out of 10, Williams achieved a Hall of Fame feat that hasn’t been equaled since. Similarly, a culture that produced four high achievers out of ten would attain wildly disproportionate success if the surrounding average was, say, one out of twenty.

Second, and conversely, an individual can possess every one of the
Triple Package qualities without being raised in a Triple Package culture. Steve Jobs had a legendarily high opinion of his own powers; long before he was famous, a former girlfriend believed he had
narcissistic personality disorder. His self-control and meticulous attention to detail were equally famous. At the same time, according to one of his closest friends, “Steve always had a kind of
chip on his shoulder. At some deep level, there was an insecurity that Steve had to go out and prove himself. I think being an orphan drove Steve in ways that most of us can never understand.”

Possibly Jobs was born with these Triple Package traits, or perhaps, as his friend speculated, being an orphan played a role. In any given family, no matter what the background,
an especially strong parent or even grandparent can instill children with a sense of exceptionality, high expectations, and discipline, creating a kind of miniature Triple Package culture inside the home. Individuals can also develop these qualities on their own. Being raised in a Triple Package culture doesn’t guarantee you anything unique or inaccessible to others; it simply increases your odds.

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E
VERY ONE OF THE PREMISES
underlying the theory of the Triple Package is supported by a well-substantiated and relatively uncontroversial body of empirical evidence. Later chapters will elaborate, but we’ll briefly summarize here.

The capacity of group superiority complexes to enhance success is borne out by repeatedly confirmed findings of
stereotype threat and stereotype boost, both in laboratory experiments and field work. Basically, belonging to a group you believe is superior at something—whether academic work or sports—psychologically primes you to perform better at that activity. Moreover, sociologists specializing in
immigrant communities have found that certain groups turn a sense of cultural pride and distinctive heritage into an “
ethnic armor” directly contributing to higher levels of educational achievement.

That insecurity can spur accomplishment is corroborated by a recent
groundswell of studies showing that a personal feeling of not being good enough—or not having done well enough—is associated with better outcomes. This conclusion is also supported by
two of the leading twentieth-century studies of individuals who have risen to eminence, including one conducted by Howard Gardner, most famous for his theory of multiple intelligences. Both studies found that insecurity, particularly stemming from childhood, figured prominently as a surprisingly common driver of success. Gardner quotes Winston Churchill:

the twinge of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished.

Lastly, an entire subfield of experimental psychology today is devoted to phenomena variously called “effortful control,” “self-regulation,” “time discounting,” “ego strength,” or (more appealingly) “
willpower” and “grit.” These concepts are all connected to impulse control, as we’re using the term: the capacity to resist temptation, especially the temptation to give up in the face of hardship. The results of these studies—beginning with the well-known “
marshmallow test”—are conclusive and bracing.
Kids with more impulse control go on to get better grades; spend less time in prison; have fewer teenage pregnancies; get better jobs; and have higher incomes. In several studies, willpower and grit proved to be
better predictors of grades and future success than did IQ or SAT scores.

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B
EFORE CLOSING THIS CHAPTER,
we need to say a word about something we didn’t include in the Triple Package: education. It’s often said that Jewish and Asian Americans do well in the United States because they come from “education cultures.” Given that the Triple Package is essentially a cultural explanation of group success, why isn’t education one of its core elements?

Because, to begin with, there are some flat-out exceptions to the rule that successful groups emphasize learning. The immensely successful but highly insular
Syrian Jewish enclave in Brooklyn does not stress education or intellectualism; indeed, higher education at prestigious universities is often disfavored. Instead this community prioritizes business, tradition, “taking over the family company,” and keeping younger generations within the fold. Because of its insularity, most people probably have never even heard of America’s Syrian Jewish community, but it’s been thriving for generations, economically as well as culturally, and elite education has decidedly not been part of its formula.

Of course it’s true that most successful groups in America do emphasize education. They also tend to save and work hard. The question is why. The worst move to make at this point—the kind of move that gives cultural theories a bad name—is to take these behaviors, turn them into adjectives, impute them to culture, and offer them up as “explanations.” Why do the Chinese save at such higher-than-average rates? Because they come from a “thrifty” culture. It’s the same with education. Why do parents from so many successful groups harp on education? Because they hail from an “education culture.”

In fact, many of America’s rising groups, although they stress academics today, do not have longstanding “education cultures.” For
example, although early Mormon pioneers founded many schools and colleges in the American West, an important current of Mormon culture for much of the twentieth century remained
relatively closed to intellectual and scientific inquiry, emphasizing “the authority of scripture over human reason.” In 1967, future Church president Spencer Kimball urged the faculty of Brigham Young University to remember that Mormons are “
men of God first and men of letters second, and men of science third . . . men of rectitude rather than academic competence.”

Even when we consider cultures supposedly steeped in centuries-old scholarly traditions, the conclusion that they focus on education today
because
of those traditions can be much too facile. Jews, for example, are sometimes said to have the quintessential “learning culture.” Yet many of the Ellis Island Jewish immigrants were barely schooled, having lived most of their lives in
shtetls
or ghettos in extreme poverty. Perhaps these unintellectual butchers and tailors transmitted to their children the great Jewish “learning tradition” through synagogues, Passover rituals, or the respect they accorded rabbis. Or perhaps not.

Nathan Glazer says that his immigrant parents and many of their generation
knew nothing of Jewish learning. The influential social psychologist Stanley Schachter made a similar point:

I went to Yale much against my father’s wishes. He couldn’t have cared less about higher education and wanted me to go to a one-year laundry college (no kidding) out in the Midwest and join him then in the family business. I never have understood what this intellectually driven Jewish immigrant business is all about. It wasn’t true of my family, and I know very few families for which it was true.

Indeed, the Jewish subgroup arguably most dedicated to and organized around the old tradition of Talmudic study is the
ultra-Orthodox Satmar community of Kiryas Joel, in Orange County, New York, which is one of the poorest groups in the entire nation.

What is it about certain groups that makes their members, however poor or “uncultured,” seize on education as a route to upward mobility? It’s simply not illuminating to say that these groups come from “hardworking cultures” or “education cultures.” That’s one step away from saying that successful groups are successful because they do what it takes to be successful—and two steps from saying that unsuccessful groups are unsuccessful because they come from “indolent cultures” and don’t do what it takes to be successful.

In short, education—like hard work—is not an
independent
, but a
dependent
variable. It’s not the explanatory factor; it’s a behavior to be explained. Successful groups in America emphasize education for their children because it’s the surest ladder to success. The challenge is to delve deeper and discover the cultural roots of this behavior—to identify the fundamental cultural forces that underlie it.

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F
OR ALL ITS VAST DIVERSITY,
America has an overarching culture of its own—a very strong one. That’s why we hear so much about America’s worldwide “cultural hegemony” or how “globalization is Americanization.” Which raises the question of whether American culture is a Triple Package culture.

Certainly it used to be. In fact, America was for a long time the quintessential Triple Package nation, convinced of its exceptional destiny, infused with a work ethic inherited from the Puritans, seized with a notorious chip on the collective shoulder vis-à-vis aristocratic Europe, and instilling a brand-new kind of insecurity in its citizens—a sense that every man must prove himself through material success,
that a man who doesn’t succeed economically is a failure. Tocqueville observed all this when he described Americans’ “
longing to rise.”

But as we’ll discuss at length later in this book, America has changed, especially in the past fifty years. Today, American culture—whether high or low, blue state or red, blue collar or ivory tower—is much more ambivalent about, and undermining of, everything the Triple Package stands for. The overwhelming message taught in American schools, public and private, is that no group is superior to any other. In America, embracing yourself as you are—feeling secure about yourself—is supposed to be the key to a successful life. People who don’t live in the present are missing out on happiness and life itself. Whatever kernels of truth may underlie these propositions, the irony is this: America still rewards people who don’t buy into them with wealth, prestige, and power.

In other words, there is a disconnect today between the story Americans tell themselves about how to think and how to live—and the reality of what the American economy rewards. Triple Package groups are taking advantage of that disconnect.

WHO’S SUCCESSFUL IN AMERICA?

I
N THIS CHAPTER WE’LL
be taking a look at America’s most successful groups as measured by income, academic accomplishment, corporate leadership, professional attainment, and other conventional metrics. But first we should clarify the kind of groups we’re looking at.

There are infinite ways to slice up the U.S. population. Countless economic mobility studies break down American wealth by race—typically white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. A recent countertrend focuses on class and class rigidity instead, dividing the population into quintiles, rich and poor, 99 percent and 1 percent. But gigantic umbrella terms like “race” and “class” obscure as much as they reveal.

The reality, uncomfortable as it may be to talk about, is that some religious, ethnic, and national-origin groups are starkly more successful than others. Without looking squarely at such groups, it’s impossible to understand economic mobility in America and what the levers of success in this country really are.

A distinctive feature of many—but by no means all—religious,
ethnic, and national-origin groups is that they are “cultural groups”: their members tend to be raised with, identify themselves by, and pass down certain culturally specific values and beliefs, habits and practices.
*
Needless to say, religion, ethnicity, and national origin are cultural starting points, not end points. Cultural subdivisions within these categories—for example, fundamentalist versus non-fundamentalist, first-generation immigrant versus third-generation—can have dramatic effects on group success, and we’ll be highlighting these finer distinctions throughout.

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I
F THERE’S ONE GROUP
in the U.S. today that’s hitting it out of the park with conventional success, it’s Mormons.

Just fifty years ago, Mormons were often regarded as a fringe group; many Americans had barely heard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (
The term “Mormon” is not part of the official Church name and comes from the Book of Mormon, a new work of scripture that the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, said he translated from golden plates received from an angel.)
Concentrated in Utah and neighboring states, Mormons were a largely isolated and insulated community, resisting many developments in modern America. As late as 1978, the LDS Church expressly
discriminated against
blacks, refusing to ordain them into the priesthood. In 1980, Mormons were
still a rarity on Wall Street and in Washington.

Three decades later, it’s hard not to notice the Mormons’ explosive success. Overwhelmingly, Mormon success has been of the most mainstream, conventional,
apple-pie variety. You don’t find a lot of Mormons breaking the mold or dropping out of college to form their own high-tech start-ups. (Omniture cofounder Josh James is a notable exception.) What you mostly find is corporate, financial, and political success, which makes perfect sense given the nature of the Mormon chip on the shoulder. Long regarded as a polygamous, almost crackpot sect, Mormons seem determined to prove they’re more American than other Americans—with a particular penchant for presidential runs.

Whereas Protestants make up about 51 percent of the U.S. population, America’s
5 to 6 million Mormons represent just 1.7 percent. Yet a stunning number have risen to the top of America’s corporate and political spheres.

Most famous of course is Mitt Romney, who, before serving as governor of Massachusetts for four years, was CEO of Bain Capital (and now has an estimated net worth of $
230 million). Jon Huntsman Jr., former U.S. Ambassador to China and for a while Romney’s rival for the 2012 Republican nomination, is also Mormon, as is majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Harry Reid.
Other leading Mormon politicians include Senator Orrin Hatch (who lost his bid for the 2000 Republican nomination to George W. Bush), Congressman Morris Udall (who lost his bid for the 1976 Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter), and Mitt’s father, former Michigan governor George Romney (who lost his bid for the 1968 Republican nomination to Richard Nixon).

In the business world,
prominent Mormons include David Neeleman, founder and former CEO of JetBlue; J. W. Marriott, chairman
and son of the founders of Marriott International; Thomas Grimm, CEO of Sam’s Club; Dave Checketts, the former CEO of Madison Square Garden and former president of the New York Knicks who now heads up the sports and entertainment firm SCP Worldwide; Kevin Rollins, the former CEO of Dell; Gary Crittenden, the former CFO of Citigroup, American Express, and Sears, Roebuck; Gary Baughman, former CEO of Fisher-Price; Kim Clark, former dean of Harvard Business School; Alison Davis-Blake, the first female dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business; Stephen Covey, author of
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
,
which has sold more than 25 million copies; and Clayton Christensen, author of
The Innovator’s Dilemma
(which Intel CEO Andy Grove said was the most important book he’d read in ten years), who was recently the subject of a
New Yorker
profile titled “When Giants Fail: What Business Has Learned from Clayton Christensen.”

And that’s
just the tip of the iceberg. Mormons have risen to the top of American Motors, Lufthansa, Deloitte, Kodak, Black & Decker, SkyWest Airlines, Lord & Taylor, Skullcandy, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Jon Huntsman Sr. became a billionaire on the
Forbes
400 list after founding one of America’s most successful chemical companies. Alan Ashton cofounded WordPerfect Corporation, making him in the 1990s one of the four hundred richest people in America. Edwin Catmull, raised in a traditional Mormon Salt Lake City family, became a pioneer of three-dimensional computer animation in the 1980s; today he’s the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and its subsidiary, the twenty-six-time Academy Award–winning Pixar Studios.

Mormons have achieved fame outside the corporate world as well. They are reportedly
overrepresented in the CIA and foreign service (apparently because of their missionary-trained language skills and clean habits), and “
out of nowhere,” Brigham Young University’s
video animation program has become a main line into the country’s major animation and special effects studios. Stephenie Meyer, author of the blockbuster
Twilight
novels, is Mormon, as is talk-radio host Glenn Beck,
Napoleon Dynamite
star Jon Heder, and all-time
Jeopardy!
record-holder
Ken Jennings (seventy-four consecutive wins).

To be sure, a list of superstars, however impressive, doesn’t by itself prove disproportionate success, and it’s worth noting that Mormons are not (yet) overrepresented among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. But here’s one way to look at the startling rise of Mormons from relative obscurity into America’s business elite. The Fortune 500 list has been published since 1955. Before 1970, there appear to have been no
Mormon senior executives in any Fortune 500 company. Since 1990, there have been fourteen, including twelve CEOs, one president, and one CFO.

Here’s another data point. In February 2012,
Goldman Sachs announced the addition of 300 more employees to the 1,300 already working in the firm’s third largest metropolitan center of operations (after New York/New Jersey and London). Where is this 1,600-employee location? In Salt Lake City, Utah. By reputation, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school is one of the nation’s best and most prestigious. In 2010, Wharton placed
thirty-one of its graduates with Goldman—exactly the same number as did Brigham Young University’s less well-known Marriott School of Management.

Getting a statistical fix on Mormon income and wealth is notoriously difficult. The country’s leading researcher on the
correlation of faith and money in the United States, Lisa Keister, says that the sample sizes studied so far are too small to support definitive conclusions (although judging by available information, she surmises that Mormon wealth is probably higher than average). Survey data paint a picture of Mormons as solidly middle-class. They are
somewhat more
likely to make $50,000–$100,000 than Americans generally (38 percent of Mormons versus 30 percent of the general population), somewhat less likely to make under $30,000 (26 percent versus 31 percent), and no more likely to make over $100,000 (in fact slightly less: 16 percent versus 18 percent).

But these numbers are hard to interpret. First, they represent
household
income, and Mormon women are encouraged to be full-time mothers; the percentage of
Mormon women who describe themselves as housewives is double that of non-Mormons. While this gives LDS men some advantages (Mormon journalist Jeff Benedict calls the “stay-at-home” wives of nine famous Mormon CEOs the “
secret” to their success), it also means that LDS men have to earn considerably more than non-Mormon men in order to keep on a par with or above overall American household income.

More important, these figures lump all Mormons together, which can be highly misleading. Mormonism is spreading rapidly around the world; one fourth of America’s Mormons are converts. While some of these converts are famous—Mr. Beck being an example—
most are relatively poor, which brings down overall Mormon income.
Non-convert Mormons are significantly more likely to make at least $50,000 a year than Americans overall (58 percent as compared with a national figure of 45 percent).

Not all Mormon households, of course, are sending their young men to Goldman Sachs. Small fundamentalist Mormon communities still exist, which tend to be insular, polygamous, and relatively poor. (These groups are excommunicated from, and
not considered Mormon by, the official LDS Church.) In Colorado City, Arizona, the “
prophet” Rulon Jeffs remained the leader of one of these groups into his nineties; as of 2003, “Uncle Rulon” had married some seventy-five women and fathered at least sixty-five children. Although they view the United States as a satanic force, the fundamentalist residents of
Colorado City are happy to accept welfare, and a third are on food stamps. But from a cultural point of view, fundamentalist Mormons are radically different from the vast majority of present-day Mormons, and as we’ll discuss later, their economic backwardness confirms the efficacy of the Triple Package (which fundamentalist Mormons lack).

The real testament to Mormons’ extraordinary capacity to earn and amass wealth, however, is the LDS Church itself. The church keeps its finances a closely guarded secret, both from the outside world and from its members; the actual numbers are known only to the Apostles,
the church’s highest leadership council, made up of twelve men (women are excluded). It’s clear, however, that church assets are vast and spread all over America—a huge conglomerate of for-profit and nonprofit enterprises.

The amount of American land owned by the Mormon church is larger than the state of Delaware. According to a former president of the Mormon Social Science Association, the church owns ten times more Florida real estate than the Walt Disney company, including “a $1 billion for-profit cattle and citrus ranch”—the largest non-government subsidized cattle operation in the United States. The LDS Church is one of America’s largest producers of nuts and one of its largest potato growers. Beneficial Life is a church-owned insurance company, with assets of $1.6 billion.
Church holdings also include at least twenty-five radio stations, commercial real estate, shopping centers, and a theme park in Hawaii containing replica Polynesian villages, which, with a million annual visitors, is one of that state’s leading tourist attractions. Brigham Young University’s endowment alone is worth nearly $1 billion.

The entire
Church of England, with its grand history, had assets of about $6.9 billion as of 2008. In 2002, counting all the money raised by all the parishes in the United States, the total annual
revenue of the
U.S. Catholic Church, with its 75 million members, was estimated at $7.5 billion. By comparison, the LDS Church, with less than a tenth of the membership, is believed to have owned $25–$30 billion in assets as of 1997—and this is said to be a “very conservative” estimate—with present revenues of $5–$6 billion a year. As one study puts it, “Per capita,
no other religion comes close to such figures.”

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T
HE
G
OIZUETA
B
USINESS
S
CHOOL
is part of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. You’ll find the
Goizueta name in a lot of places in Atlanta—the Atlanta Ballet, the Atlanta History Center, Georgia Tech—because
Roberto Goizueta was chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola from 1981 until his death in 1997 and one of Atlanta’s leading philanthropists. Goizueta, who in 1960 defected from Cuba with his family and little more than forty dollars in his pocket, was the most successful CEO in Coca-Cola’s history, launching Diet Coke, globalizing the Coca-Cola brand, quadrupling its profits, and taking its market capitalization from $4 billion to $180 billion, an increase of 4,400 percent.

Between 1959 and 1973, hundreds of thousands of anti-Castro Cubans—the “
Cuban Exiles”—fled to the United States, most of them settling in Miami.
*
As mentioned earlier, theirs was a classic case of Triple Package status collapse. In Cuba, most of the Exiles
had been
middle and upper class, including many judges, professionals, engineers, academics, and white-collar employees of large corporations. Some came from families with summer homes and art collections, at the pinnacle of a highly stratified society. To the humiliating sting of becoming menial workers, looked down on and discriminated against as a racial or ethnic underclass, was added the resentment they felt against Castro, who had not only defeated them, but taken everything they had. Their “disgrace,” as one Cuban historian writes, “became
the psychological impetus that fueled their efforts to prevail in the economic arena.”

And they did prevail. In the 1950s,
Miami was still largely a resort and retiree town, servicing winter visitors and refugees from the cold Northeast. Today, the greater Miami area is home to
more than 1,100 multinational corporations. The city is a global economic hub with the
eleventh-highest gross metropolitan product in the country and a thriving business life in which Cuban Americans play a central role.