The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  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.

  entrepreneurial Igbo: Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), pp. 74–6; Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 27–8, 154–5, 164–6, 243–9; Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 108–9.

  Jews are the “chosen”: See generally Avi Beker, The Chosen: The History of an Idea, and the Anatomy of an Obsession (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008); David Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Daniel H. Frank, ed., A People Apart: Chosenness and Ritual in Jewish Philosophical Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Arnold M. Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

  a moral people, a people of law: See, e.g., Louis Dembitz Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It” (speech delivered in June 1915), reprinted in Steve Israel and Seth Forman, eds., Great Jewish Speeches Throughout History (Northvale, NJ, and London: Jason Aronson Inc., 1994), pp. 69, 74; Patai, The Jewish Mind, pp. 8–9, 324, 339; Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (2d ed.) (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 136–7.

  To be an immigrant: See, e.g., Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 72, 90; Eleanor J. Murphy, “Transnational Ties and Mental Health,” in Ramaswami Mahalingam, ed., Cultural Psychology of Immigrants (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2006), pp. 79, 81; Vivian S. Louie, Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 123–5.

  diagnostically recognized symptom: American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., Text Revision) (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Assn., 2000), p. 720.

  Freud speculated: Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” in James Strachey, ed. and trans., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), vol. 9, p. 186 (“Generally speaking, our civilization is built up on the suppression of instincts”).

  youth culture: See Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 34; Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (New York: Viking, 2007); see also Patricia Cohen, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age (New York: Scribner, 2012), p. 168.

  large marble pig: Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 38; Anthony R. Birley, Hadrian: The Restless Emperor (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 276.

  filthy and degenerate: Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 51 (“human garbage”), 230 (“slovenly in dress, loud in manners, and vulgar in discourse”).

  “chip on the shoulder”: Stephen Birmingham, “The Rest of Us”: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), p. 17; see also Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 82 (describing “Jewishness” for Proust in Remembrance of Things Past as “at once a physical stain and a mysterious personal privilege”).

  New York intellectuals: See Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 32–3 (describing what Kazin called the “humiliation” he suffered at the hands of those with “a long-bred talent for sociability,” which he never outlived and which made him “bitter, bitter”); Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), pp. 340–1 (quoting Rhoda Lazare Wolf as saying that Norman Mailer wanted “to conquer the world. He doesn’t want to be the boy from Crown Street”); Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910–1960 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 491 (describing how Delmore Schwartz “flipped . . . from grandiose self-esteem to histrionic self-loathing”); Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 54 (describing his father, Saul Bellow, as “an unknown Jewish novelist” who—whatever his “personal insecurities”—threw “down the gauntlet to the American literary establishment personified by Ernest Hemingway”); James Atlas, Bellow (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 10, 23, 32, 50; Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg—A Life (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 83 (“Although [Greenberg] appeared confident, his arrogance concealed a self-doubt that had
to be hidden at all costs, especially from himself”); Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams, p. 533 (describing Clement Greenberg as “arrogant and insecure”); Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 5 (“my ‘noblest’ ambitions were tied to the vulgar desire to rise above the class into which I was born . . . [and] to an astonishing extent . . . were shaped and defined by the standards and values and tastes of the class into which I did not know I wanted to move”) and p. 38 (describing the “disdain” he encountered at Columbia from “those whose wealth was inherited”); see also Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 34 (noting that Lionel Trilling “was acutely sensitive to the way in which society attempted to exclude Jews,” that “he felt a special antagonism toward . . . genteel German Jews who were proud of their high degree of acculturation”); see generally Alan Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 308 (“Essential” to the “success of the New York Intellectuals was their desire to achieve something in the society which had excluded their parents”); and pp. 17, 21–23, 27, 155.

  Nietzsche taught: See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 54, 73, 124 (describing “ressentiment” as “inexhaustible and insatiable”), 126–8; see also Robert C. Solomon, “Nietzsche and the Emotions,” in Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald Lehrer, eds., Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 127, 142.