by Amy Chua
Historians will long debate why Americans fell so headlong into the savings and loan bubble of the late 1980s, the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, and then, even after the bursting of those two, the mother of all bubbles in the 2000s. Without minimizing other causes, part of the reason is simply that America had lost the Triple Package, and this loss had infected the whole system. At every level of the economy, from borrowers to bankers to hedge-fund billionaires, people didn’t feel anywhere near enough insecurity or exercise anywhere near enough self-control. Thus America failed the marshmallow test—and paid the price.
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WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
To recover from its instant gratification disorder, America would have to recover its Triple Package. Throughout this book, however, we’ve stressed the dark underside of the Triple Package in many if its forms. If, therefore, America is to aspire to a reinvigorated Triple Package, it has to be a Triple Package worth aspiring to. To that end, we close by addressing each element of the Triple Package in turn.
First, superiority. This is the one Triple Package element America hasn’t lost. Americans still believe in America’s exceptionality. They still routinely and publicly call their country “the greatest nation on earth”—a phrase you’ll almost never hear Europeans (or anyone else) using. Tony Blair once called the United Kingdom “the greatest nation on earth,” and the British press roundly lampooned him for it. By contrast, when Barack Obama said he believed in American exceptionalism “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” he was criticized for being insufficiently and inauthentically exceptionalist.
National superiority complexes can be a tremendous source of confidence, cohesion, and willingness to sacrifice. They are also among the most dangerous forces in human history. Nazi Germany had a whopping superiority complex. So did imperial Japan.
The only justifiable national superiority complex is one true to America’s constitutional ideals of equality and openness. America remains today the country most open to the talents and dreams of all. That is a superiority worth aspiring to—a superiority that includes rather than excludes, and at its best restrains rather than fosters imperialism.
This kind of superiority complex is not available to ethnic or religious groups, because they can’t open themselves equally to people of all backgrounds and beliefs. To do so would mean losing their identity. But again, America is not an ethnic or religious group. It’s a vast and diverse nation. In this respect, America has an advantage over its Triple Package groups. America can and must champion principles of equality and inclusion that ethnic and religious minorities can’t. But it’s precisely this equality and inclusion, on America’s part, that will keep drawing Triple Package groups, with their tremendous economic energy, to America’s shores.
Second, insecurity. Insecurity is in many respects destructive at the national level. For one thing, it too can make nations dangerous; the belief that “national security” is in danger can easily become a justification for cracking down on civil liberties or making war on the basis of unsubstantiated factual claims. Moreover, whatever it is that made the country insecure—the attacks it suffered, the economic threats it faces—will have exacted their own, sometimes dreadful price. Nevertheless, the Triple Package holds, in diametric opposition to self-esteem thinking, that adversity and self-questioning can be good things.
For most of its history America was an upstart, an underdog. Only toward the end of the Cold War did America emerge unrivaled, on top of the world. China is exploding today in part because it’s so insecure. (As China experts Orville Schell and John Delury put it, a deep sense of “humiliation”—of being “stepped on” and outpaced by the West—has “served as a sharp goad urging Chinese to sacrifice” so that their country can recover its former grandeur.) China has the Triple Package in spades, with an outsize superiority complex, a Confucian tradition of impulse control, and above all a determination to prove itself once again to the world. What Americans needed in the 1980s and ’90s was more insecurity.
Thus the horror of 9/11, the unwon wars that followed, the rise of China, even the financial collapse—all this has had, paradoxically, one beneficial consequence: the return of Triple Package insecurity. But the insecurity Americans need is not one of fear or belligerence. Triple Package insecurity is the hunger to prove oneself, tempering superiority with the feeling that one is not, at least yet, good enough. Historically, the United States has risen to its greatest achievements when Americans have felt the call to prove their country’s mettle, morality, and ability to win out over grievous challenges. Americans did just this after Pearl Harbor, when the country had not only suffered an attack on its soil but had barely emerged from the deepest depression in its history. For better or worse, America has that opportunity again today.
Finally, impulse control. Going forward, impulse control may be the most important element of the Triple Package to focus on because it offers a path into the Triple Package for everyone, regardless of background. The Triple Package isn’t members-only. It’s not the exclusive property of Triple Package groups. The way in—not that it’s remotely easy—is through grit: by making the ability to work hard, persevere, and overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority.
This kind of superiority isn’t zero-sum; it’s not ethnically or religiously exclusive. It doesn’t come from being a member of a group at all. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will and his own accomplishments. Like a national superiority complex based on equality, this too is a superiority worth aspiring to.
Born in the South Bronx to struggling Puerto Rican parents, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was not raised in a Triple Package group. Nor was she raised in a high-discipline, high-expectations Triple Package family. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother’s “way of coping was to avoid being at home,” Sotomayor recalls in her magnificent autobiography, My Beloved World. But Sotomayor—who gave herself painful insulin shots for juvenile diabetes starting around age eight—writes that despite “the fragile world of my childhood,” she was “blessed” with a “stubborn perseverance” and the belief that she could overcome whatever obstacles life threw at her. She wasn’t always a high achiever in school. But in fifth grade, she “did something very unusual for a child” and “decided to approach one of the smartest girls in the class and ask her how to study.” Soon her teachers had re-seated her in the row “reserved for the top students,” and a few years later she would be applying to Princeton—against the advice of her guidance counselor, who recommended “Catholic colleges.”
The point of this example is not, “See, it’s easy to climb out of poverty in America—Sotomayor did it.” On the contrary, Sotomayor’s story illustrates just how extraordinary a person has to be to overcome the odds and institutions she had stacked against her.
The difference between Triple Package individuals, like Sotomayor, and Triple Package groups is that members of the latter are pushed by family and culture to work hard and strive, whereas a Triple Package individual may have no resources to draw on other than his or her own. (As was true in Sotomayor’s case, a single relative or mentor can make an enormous difference.) Sometimes Triple Package individuals may even be disparaged by members of their own group.
Many have drawn attention to an “oppositional” strand of contemporary black urban culture that disdains studiousness and “getting straight A’s” as “acting white.” (Interestingly, however, Harvard economist Roland Fryer’s important 2006 study found that this phenomenon did not exist at all-black schools.) But what’s rarely observed is the strangely parallel disparagement of discipline and academic striving that has emerged among America’s affluent classes.
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 biz
arrely 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.
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TO 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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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, Ale
x 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.
NOTES
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).
