The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  The Indian American list: Katherine Jacobsen, “Amar Bose, Inventor of Bose Speakers, Dies, Christian Science Monitor, July 15, 2013; “Amar Bose,” Forbes.com, Mar. 2011, http://www.forbes.com/profile/amar-bose; “Top 6 Indian CEOs in America,” SiliconIndia, Mar. 15, 2012, http://www.siliconindia.com/news/usindians/Top-6-Indian-CEOs-in-America-nid-109397-cid-49.html; “Boot Camp for Engineers,” Forbes.com, Apr. 16, 2001, http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0416/088.html; Julia Werdigier, “Two Executives Are Ousted at HSBS,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 2007.

  Indian American Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: “Vinod Khosla—Partner Emeritus,” Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, http://www.kpcb.com/partner/vinod-khosla; Vivek Wadhwa, “The Face of Success, Part I: How the Indians Conquered Silicon Valley,” Inc., Jan. 13, 2012, http://www.inc.com/vivek-wadhwa/how-the-indians-succeeded-in-silicon-valley.html.

  Bobby Jindal: Jill Konieczko, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Bobby Jindal,” U.S. News & World Report, May 22, 2008.

  Nikki Haley: Jonathan Martin, “Democratic South Carolina Chair Defends Nikki Haley Barb,” Politico, May 14, 2013, http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/dick-harpootlian-nikki-haley-90918.html.

  cover of Time magazine: See Massimo Calabresi and Bill Saporito, “The Street Fighter,” Time, Feb. 13, 2012.

  “I thought I had”: Remark made by presenter Atul Gawande at Boston Public Library “Literary Lights” award ceremony, Apr. 15, 2012 (attended by Amy Chua).

  underrepresented at the top levels: See New York City Bar, 2010 Law Firm Diversity Benchmarking Report: A Report to Signatory Law Firms (New York City Bar Association, 2010), p. 15. A study of the largest Bay Area corporations concludes that while Asians are well-represented in the workforce, they are underrepresented in the boardroom and at the top executive levels. See Buck Gee and Wes Hom, “The Failure of Asian Success in the Bay Area: Asians as Corporate Executive Leaders” (Corporate Executive Initiative, Mar. 28, 2009), p. 3.

  five Indian American CEOs . . . no Chinese Americans: “Where’s the Diversity in Fortune 500 CEOs?,” DiversityInc, http://www.diversityinc.com/diversity-facts/wheres-the-diversity-in-fortune-500-ceos.

  discrimination . . . quarterback mentality: Gee and Hom, “The Failure of Asian Success in the Bay Area,” p. 3; Wesley Yang, “Paper Tigers,” New York Magazine, May 8, 2011 (quoting Columbia Professor Tim Wu).

  Over 65 percent of Chinese Americans . . . over 90 percent: Zhou, “Negotiating Culture and Ethnicity, pp. 315, 317.

  87 percent of Indian American adults: Pew Research Center, The Rise of Asian Americans, p. 44.

  about 15 percent of American Jewish adults: Jonathon Ament, Jewish Immigrants in the United States (United Jewish Communities Report Series on the National Jewish Population Survey 2001-01, October 2004), p. 4, n.3.

  a 3 percent Chinese minority: Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 43.

  Census is barred by law: U.S. Census Bureau, “Religion Statistics and Publications,” http://www.census.gov/prod/www/religion.htm.

  antiquity—but that’s about the last time they weren’t: Chua, World on Fire, pp. 79–82, 202–4, 217–21; Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1996), pp. 236–7 (noting that “in ancient times” Jews were not yet middlemen and “most Jews were in fact poor”); see generally Michael Grant, The Jews in the Roman World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).

  about 43 percent: See “The Jewish Population of the World (2010),” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewpop.html. Estimates of the American Jewish population vary. See Ira Sheskin and Arnold Dashefsky, Jewish Population in the United States, 2012 (Storrs, CT: North American Jewish Data Bank, 2012), pp. 7–10, 15 (discussing methodological difficulties and estimating likely U.S. Jewish population at 6.0–6.4 million).

  roughly zero were Jewish: Jeremy Fine, “No Jewish Masters,” Jewish Journal, Apr. 11, 2010, http://www.jewishjournal.com/the_great_rabbino/item/no_jewish_masters_ 20100411. In general, Jews are underrepresented in American sports, but according to one entertaining recent book, their contributions have not been inconsequential. See Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy, eds., Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame (New York: Twelve, 2012).

  highest-paid CEOs: “America’s Highest Paid Chief Executives,” Forbes, Mar. 25, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-compensation-11_rank.html.

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

  Jews on the Forbes 400: Jacob Berkman, “At Least 139 of the Forbes 400 are Jewish,” Oct. 5, 2009, http://blogs.jta.org/philanthropy/article/2009/10/05/1008323/at-least-139-of-the-forbes-400-are-jewish.

  fortunes in real estate: “The Forbes 400: The Richest People in America,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/#page:1_sort:0_direction:asc_search:_filter:Real%20Estate_filter:All%20states_filter:All%20categories (as of March 27, 2012) (religious affiliations compiled for and on file with authors); see also Steven L. Pease, The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement (Sonoma, CA: Deucalion, 2009), p. 238.

  pledged to leave half their estates to charity: Marc Tracy, “Generous Jews: Nearly Half of ‘Pledge’ Billionaires are MOTs,” Tablet Magazine, Aug. 5, 2010, http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/41829/generous-jews; see also Kent McGroarty, Biography on Diane von Furstenberg (Hyperink, 2012), p. 5.

  the Tony: Stewart F. Lane, Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011), p. 190.

  Many of America’s best-loved comics: Lane, Jews on Broadway, pp. 42–3, 111; David K. Israel, “The Top 20 Jewish Comedians of All Time,” Mental Floss, http://mentalfloss.com/article/22596/top-20-jewish-comedians-all-time.

  Academy Award . . . Pulitzer Prize winners: Pease, The Golden Age, pp. viii–ix, Table 1.

  psychiatrists . . . physicians: See Will Dunham, “Psychiatrists Least Religious of U.S. Doctors: Study,” Reuters, Sept. 3, 2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/03/us-psychiatrists-religion-idUSN0228386620070903.

  New York City’s law offices: See Steven Silbiger, The Jewish Phenomenon: Seven Keys to the Enduring Wealth of a People (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 2001), p. 29.

  justices . . . Architecture superstars: Pease, The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement, pp. 76–7, 134–5.

  Advice-giving: Ruth Andrew Ellenson, “Jewish Advice Columnists from Miss Manners to Dear Abby,” Jewish Women, Fall 2008.

  United Jewish Association report: Jacob B. Ukeles, Steven M. Cohen, and Ron Miller, Jewish Community Study of New York: 2011 Special Report on Poverty (rev. ed) (New York: UJA-Federation of New York, June 2013), pp. 15, 72. The report defines “poor” as “less than 150% of the 2010 federal poverty guideline.” Ibid., p. 21. Cf. Keister, Faith and Money, p. 71 (stating that Jewish poverty rates are “notably low” compared to other religions).

  Jewish median household income . . . $97,000 to $98,000: This estimate is based on data from the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey—Religious Affiliation: Diverse and Dynamic (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2008) (reporting 2006 data). No overall household income figure is given, but the study indicates that as of 2006, 46 percent of American Jewish households had incomes of at least $100,000. Ibid., pp. 60, 78. From this, we conservatively extrapolated a 2006 median income of $90,000–90,900. We then converted that range to 2010 dollars (as the Census Bureau does for its multi-year estimates of other groups’ income, such as the $90,500 figure mentioned in the text for Indian Americans’ income), using the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics conversion tool, http://www.bls.gov/data/ inflation_calculator.htm, producing a range from $97,346 to 98,320. The 2010 medi
an household income for the U.S. population as a whole was about $51,000. U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset). Throughout this book, we measure group income as of 2010; data from 2013 suggest that Jewish income may be declining slightly. See Pew Research Center, A Portrait of Jewish Americans: Findings from a Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2013), p. 42 (reporting that 42 percent of American Jews had household incomes of at least $100,000).

  Indian Americans . . . $90,500: 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).

  exceeds that of Protestants by up to 246 percent: Keister, Faith and Money, p. 171. One twenty-five-year tracking study found almost half of all Jews to have a net worth of over $600,000, as compared to 6.8 percent of white conservative Protestants, 0.8 percent of black conservative Protestants, 14.2 percent of “mainline” Protestants, 13.7 percent of Catholics, and 10.6 percent of all respondents. What about low net worth? Defining low net worth as zero or less, 11.2 percent of white conservative Protestants fell in that category, as did 32.5 percent of black conservative Protestants, and 8 percent of Catholics. Among all respondents in the survey, 13.3 percent had zero or lower net worth. For Jews, the figure was 2.1 percent. Ibid., p. 90 (Table 4.2).

  According to Pew: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, p. 78.

  Reform Jews, 55 percent . . . nation as a whole . . . 18 percent: Ibid.

  New Left and the neoconservative movement: See, e.g., Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chaps. 2, 4–6.

  American academia . . . “disproportionate role”: Pease, The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement, pp. 29–39, 52–7, 64–71.

  “When the studio chiefs”: Joel Stein, “How Jewish Is Hollywood?,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 19, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein19-2008dec19,0,4676183.column.

  a fifth of all Nobel laureates: Pease, Golden Age of Jewish Achievement, p. ix (23 percent); Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), pp. 342, 548 (between 1901 and 1994 Jews, 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).

  Nobel Prize for economics: Pease, The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement, p. 68; “All Prizes in Economic Sciences,” Nobelprize.org, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates.

  36 percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded to Americans: Ari Ben-Menahem, Historical Encyclopedia of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (New York: Springer, 2009), vol. 1, part 3, p. 2891, n. 39.

  race for the atom bomb: See Pease, The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement, pp. 44–5, 53; Ronald W. Clark, The Birth of the Bomb (New York: Horizon Press, 1961), pp. 1–3, 8–13; Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), pp. 49–50; C. P. Snow, The Physicists (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1981), pp. 79–80, 103, 131, 159.

  Iranian immigration: Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Daniel Douglas, “Success(ion): Second-Generation Iranian Americans,” Iranian Studies 44, no. 1 (January 2011), pp. 10–13; see also Mitra K. Shavarini, Educating Immigrants: Experiences of Second-Generation Iranians (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004), pp. 35–41; U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 540 – Iranian).

  numerous ethnic and religious groups: Shavarini, Educating Immigrants, pp. 2, 47–51.

  relatively low profile: Ibid., pp. 2–6.

  “vulgar, materialistic show-offs”: Mike Hale, “The Children of Old Tehran Go Hollywood,” New York Times, Mar. 9, 2012; Jon Michaud, “Life in Irangeles,” The New Yorker, Mar. 14, 2012.

  “the most highly educated ethnic group in the United States”: Ali Mostashari and Ali Khodamhosseini, “An Overview of Socioeconomic Characteristics of the Iranian-American Community, based on the 2000 U.S. Census” (Iranian Studies Group at MIT), February 2004, http://www.isgmit.org/projects-storage/census/socioeconomic.pdf; see Phyllis McIntosh, “Iranian-Americans Reported Among Most Highly Educated in U.S.,” Payvand Iran News, Jan. 26, 2004, http://www.payvand.com/news/04/jan/1191.html.

  over 17 percent lived in houses: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, Table DP04: Selected Housing Characteristics (2010 5-year dataset) (population group codes 001 – total population; 540 – Iranian).

  median household income . . . One in three: U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Tables S0201: Selected Population Characteristics in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 540 – Iranian); DP03: Selected Economic Characteristics (2010 5-year dataset) (population group codes 001 – total population; 540 – Iranian).

  Carlos Slim: “The World’s Billionaires,” Forbes, Mar. 2013; Chua, World on Fire, pp. 60–3.

  Lebanese minorities: Chua, World on Fire, pp. 66–7, 115–20; see generally Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi, eds., The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London: The Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1992).

  Lebanese immigrants: Alixa Naff, “Lebanese Immigration into the United States: 1880 to the Present,” in Hourani and Shehadi, The Lebanese in the World, pp. 141–2, 145–8, 161–3; Philippe W. Zgheib and Abdulrahim K. Kowatly, “Autonomy, Locus of Control, and Entrepreneurial Orientation of Lebanese Expatriates Worldwide,” Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship 24, no. 3 (2011), pp. 345, 347; Zeinab Fawaz, Success Factors of Lebanese Small Businesses in the United States (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2012), pp. 3–5, 19–20.

  Lebanese American population . . . income numbers: U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 509 – Lebanese).

  foreign-born: U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group codes 509 – Lebanese; 540 – Iranian).

  probably only a half: See Nalf, “Lebanese Immigration into the United States,” pp. 159–60.

  Sununu . . . Shaheen: William Saletan, “Lawrence of Nashua: New Hampshire’s All-Arab-American Senate Race,” Slate, Oct. 16, 2002, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ballot_box/2002/10/lawrence_of_nashua.html.

  Japanese Americans: See U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 022 – Japanese) (median household income of $65,573).

  Greek Americans: See U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 536 – Greek) (median household income of $62,552); Charles C. Moskos, Greek Americans: Struggle and Success (2d ed.) (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 1989), pp. 52, 112–15.

  arguably the five most successful: No authoritative metric and no conclusive ranking exists for disproportionate group economic success in America. In terms of 2010 median household income, the Jewish figure of about $97,000 is probably the highest of any group; Indians (about $91,000) would be second-highest, with Iranians ($68,000), Chinese ($67,000), and Lebanese ($67,000) very close to the top as well. These five groups also rank at or near the top in percent of households earning more than $100,000 per year and percent of households earning more than $200,000 per year. (For median household incomes of all Census-tracked groups, see U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201 [2010 3-year dataset]; for percentages earning over $100,000 and $200,000, see ibid., Table DP03 [2010 5-year dataset]; for Jews, see the note on Jewish income above.) But incom
e measures capture only a piece of economic success. Academic attainment among the young is a critical predictor of success in the next generation; corporate and business achievement is an important marker of conventional success in the American economy; and intergenerational mobility—the ability of children born to lower-income parents to rise to relative affluence—is another key measure of disproportionate group economic success in the United States as well. We tried to take into account all these factors in deciding which groups to focus on in this book.

  But our selection was necessarily restricted by time, space, and information limits. As mentioned, our book measures income only as of 2010. We also restricted our scope to groups with significant populations in America; we chose 100,000 as the cut-off. In addition, we ruled out certain Census-generated group classifications because of the way the Census Bureau acquires its ancestry information. The decennial census no longer asks all respondents about their ethnic or national origins (although it does ask about their “race”). Instead, the Census Bureau takes data from the American Community Survey (ACS), an annual sample population survey (also administered by the Bureau), which asks individuals open-endedly to state their “ancestry or ethnic origin.” More than one answer is permitted; an individual’s first two responses are recorded. As a result, some Census-generated classifications are simply too amorphous for our purposes (e.g., “European”), while others are of uncertain validity. For example, Census data show about 1.1 million “British” Americans with a median income among the highest in the country; but Census data also show 27 million “English” Americans with a significantly lower median income. See U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group codes 520 – British; 529 – English). While there is some reason to think that self-identified “British” Americans may form a distinct cultural group (quite possibly a Triple Package group), this hypothesis could not be verified, and we ultimately chose to exclude “British” Americans from our analysis.