Amy Chua and Her Husband's New Book on Traits Leading to Success

choi

Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, What Drives Success?  Culture pushes some groups to achieve. We can learn from them. New York Times, Jan 26, 2014.
www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opini ... drives-success.html
(groups in US: Indians (from India), Iranians, Lebanese, Chinese, Mormons, Jews, Nigerians, Cubans  

Excerpts in the windows of print:
(a) Anyone can cultivate these traits. But it takes grits.
(b) They often feel a need to prove themselves.


Quote:

"Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many of America’s most recognizable companies.

"Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’ adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.

"Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.

"Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.

"All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.

"Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.

It is not "that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.

"It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

"Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.

"By contrast, white American parents have been found to be more focused on building children’s social skills and self-esteem.

"In isolation, each of these three qualities would be insufficient.

"Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts

"At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control [ie, instant gratification].

"But research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children. This supports those who, like the Nobel Prize-winning economist James J Heckman, argue that education dollars for the underprivileged are best spent on early childhood intervention, beginning at preschool age, when kids are most formable.

"The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.

Note:
(a) "A superiority complex can be even more invidious."

invidious (adj; from Latin noun feminine invidia envy):
"of an unpleasant or objectionable nature :  OBNOXIOUS <invidious remarks>"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invidious
(b) James Heckman
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heckman
(1944- ; American; University of Chicago; Heckman shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2000 with Daniel McFadden for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics)
(c) moose
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose
("this large animal, Alces alces, is always called a 'moose' in North America but usually called an 'elk' in British English. That same word 'elk,' as used by a North American, means a completely different and only somewhat related animal, Cervus canadensis")

Search this Wiki page with "size" and one will learn that American ones are NOT necessariky bigger than European ones.