The Superior Cultural Groups

~ Laura

I hesitate to link to this troll bait article in the New York Post, but it’s part of my job as a blogger to point to the hot topics, even if the hot topics result in bleeding on the brain.

In her new book, Any Chua of Tiger Mom fame explains that certain ethnic groups are more rich and successful than others. The “winner cultures” are the Jewish, Indians, the Chinese, Iranians, Lebanese-Americans, Nigerians, Cuban exiles, and the Mormons.

These groups — “cultural,” mind you, never “ethnic” or “racial” or “religious” — all possess, in the authors’ estimation, three qualities that they’ve identified as guarantors of wealth and power: superiority, insecurity and impulse control.

“That certain groups do much better in America than others — as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on — is difficult to talk about,” the authors write. “In large part, this is because the topic feels so racially charged.”

And so begins their cat-and-mouse polemic, in which they claim they’re courageously agitating for a greater good: the revival of America itself as a “Triple Package Culture.” It’s a series of shock-arguments wrapped in self-help tropes, and it’s meant to do what racist arguments do: scare people.

The book sounds silly, but the review was awesome. I haven’t read such good writing in the New York Post in ages.

Published by Laura

15 thoughts on “The Superior Cultural Groups”

  1. superiority, insecurity and impulse control

    The combination of first two of those is pretty much guaranteed to result in an unbearable asshole.

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    2. Entrepreneurial and middle-man minorities are generally unloved in their host countries (see the Lebanese and Indians in Africa, Jews and Christians in the Middle East, Jews in Europe, Germans in Eastern Europe, Chinese minorities in Asia, etc.).

      There’s a Thomas Sowell book I can’t remember the name of where he talks about high-achieving entrepreneurial minorities whose fate generally follows the following pattern:

      1. Success

      2. Pogrom

      It says something really depressing about the human race that the most natural response to high-achieving, productive minorities is to want to keep them down, rather than to learn from their success. I’m sure Sowell did not intend this, but after reading a number of stories of hard-working, hard-studying ethnic groups whose reward was persecution, exile, and genocide, you can’t help but wonder, maybe it’s not worth bothering?

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      1. I don’t think it is much of a pattern. Germans in Eastern Europe have attracted some hostility, but certainly killed far, far more people Eastern Europeans than vice versa. And while Chinese minorities in Asia have faced hostility, it’s been a lower death toll than Chinese people have faced in China during the last couple of centuries.

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  2. I wonder how this will go over in Yale law school, where Chua and Jed Rubenfeld (her husband and co-author) teach. If I were a student there, I would avoid taking their classes and ask to be switched out of any of the sections they teach if I got assigned to them(In most if not all law schools, law students don’t get to choose their classes until their second year) because of their book. I would do that whether I was someone from one of the privileged cultures or not. Either way, the expectations foisted upon me would be a clear bias.

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  3. I certainly hope that expressing controversial ideas doesn’t get one in trouble at Yale (or any other academic institution). Absent evidence that a professor discriminates on invidious grounds in the classroom, student complaints of bias should be dismissed.

    That said, the review does pretty much eviscerate the book. Of course, I haven’t read the book, so maybe the review is unfair or deceptive. Maybe I’ll read some more reviews. It isn’t the sort of book I read, so I probably won’t read it no matter what. (Now I’m done with thinking about Amy Chua for another year or two.)

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  4. If these are the rich and successful cultural groups then why is 99% of power still held by white men?

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  5. The US Senate and the Forbes 400 (to take two samples of the powerful) have a lot more than 1% of their members from Amy Chua’s named groups. So the 99% number has no basis. Although I don’t particularly buy her theories, it’s silly to deny that the groups she names have been very (and disproportionately) successful in America.

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    1. So, I’ll use a more realistic figure*, 75%, and the point still stands. There is a big difference between being a doctor or a small business owner, which are successful professions, of course, and being in a position of power to make decisions that will affect millions of people.

      *From the data I can find:

      94% of Fortune 500 CEOs are white
      93% of US Senators are white
      82% of US Reps are white

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  6. Yes, a great review.

    I don’t think the facts support the Chuas’ arguments. I’ve looked at a few pages on the Pew website on demographics, and it’s not a clear picture. For one thing, Mormons are less likely than the general population to have incomes over $100,000: http://www.pewforum.org/2009/07/24/a-portrait-of-mormons-in-the-us/#4
    The medican household income for Cubans is less than the median household income for non-hispanic whites: http://pewhispanic.org/files/factsheets/23.pdf

    A couple of factors the groups may all share are: more likely to be married, and lower birth rates, factors which make the high-investment style of parenting possible. ( With the exception of the Mormons on the birth rate thing.) Some of the groups are too small to be easily studied–all the groups are too small to make arguments. Chinese, Jews, and Cubans seem to have fewer children than the American norm. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3096844?uid=3739696&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103301606183

    This may be a short-term recipe for producing professional children, but it’s not a recipe for lasting cultural influence.

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  7. Jews, Iranians, Lebanese and most Mormons are white, so these numbers are still not particularly relevant to the question of whether those groups are disproportionately successful. In fact, the whole introduction of race was a red herring.

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    1. Ditto the early Cuban emigres.

      I have the feeling from watching Balseros that there is probably a dramatic difference between different waves of Cuban emigration. (The Balseros boat-builders seemed to be disproportionately black.)

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  8. The inclusion of Nigerians is an interesting choice.

    I keep seeing data points for the Nigerians as an up-and-coming nationality. We recently had a really brilliant and charismatic Nigerian missionary Catholic chaplain. Also, there seem to be a lot of Nigerians here on campus. Their national film industry is doing surprisingly well–just in terms of sheer quantity of films, they are #2 in the world.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_Nigeria

    The population of Nigeria is over half of ours, they send quite a few Catholic missionary priests to the US, and the Nigerian Anglicans are kind of a big deal. Even the Nigerian scams are a sign of a certain level of sophistication.

    They’ve got the usual strife going, though. Boko Haram (“Western Education is Sinful”) is active there.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boko_Haram

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  9. In other words: wealthy, well-educated, and extraordinarily ambitious Chinese/Nigerians/Lebanese who immigrate to the US and their offspring tend to do better than Americans as a whole. Next up: children of PhDs tend to be more successful than children of high school dropouts. News at 11*

    Other thought: is this the corollary of John Derbyshire’s essay (which I will not google and link to, you can do that yourself) saying that some cultures (aka the Roma) just “suck”? Maybe they can get a book deal together.

    *Maybe she should examine the role of visa and immigration policies, but that probably doesn’t fit in with her new “law professor troll” career path.

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