The Triple Package

By -
The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld

This book got some notice when it came out because one of the authors is the Tiger Mother woman.  Turns out she's also a law professor and does a lot of this global analysis stuff too.  (I have not read the tiger mother books, so maybe she said that and I just didn't know.)

Chua and Rubenfeld sort of profile ethnic/cultural groups in America that have done unusually well: Jews, Nigerians, Cubans, Chinese, Mormons, and a few others.  They isolate three cultural traits: a superiority complex, impulse control, and feelings of inferiority.  Their claim is that these three traits, working together, in an open society, will produce a group that tends to be more materially successful than the average.  And then they delve into some detail.

I didn't feel like they did anywhere near as much analysis as would be useful.  They'll kind of jump around, spending a page or two on one group before moving on to another.  I really mostly picked the book up because the inclusion of Mormons caught my eye--that's the only group in the book that isn't ethnically based.  Anybody can be a Mormon.  But they restricted the working definition of 'Mormon' to mostly include people whose families have been LDS for more than a generation, even though some of the people they profile are converts.  Anyway, I felt like any analysis of Mormons was so shallow and short as to be nearly useless.  So I'm kind of thinking that if a Cuban or Nigerian read this book, they'd feel like the analysis of their cultures was useless too.

More usefully, the authors talk about why these three traits might produce a lot of driven, wealthy people.  I was happy to see that they talk about the (often severe) problems that can come along for the ride, and I was even happier that they spent quite a while talking about how "success" might not really be solely defined as "getting rich."  They also discuss how Triple Package traits can be crushed right out of a group or can be useless in an oppressive society; they work very hard to be fair.

Not a bad read, not earthshaking either.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more