One of the groups that have had a decline of fortune is white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), who Chua told me were the original triple-package culture.
When the husband of the Tiger Mom says you’ve entered a subject area that’s “about as politically incorrect as we can get,” that’s saying something. I elicited that response after asking Jed Rubenfeld to analyze the success and relative stability of Jews vs. the decline of WASPs. Rubenfeld is the less-known half of the married duo that just brought us The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.
Shame on Rubenfeld and Amy Chua for not including my own triple threat – Montenegrins, Italians, and descendants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead they lauded the success of Asians, Cubans, Jews, Indians, Nigerians, Mormons, Iranians, and Lebanese. The Yale Law School professors assert those eight groups distinguish themselves by leading lives dictated by their superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control. (Each trait, they say, runs contrary to a core tenet of contemporary thinking.) They believe that while any person from any background can embody those traits, their research shows it is instilled more frequently by the groups they chart.
How else to explain why, in 2010, Nigerians were 0.7 percent of the black American population, but (in 2013) accounted for between 20 to 25 percent of the 120 black students at Harvard Business School? Or that, in 2010, the Wharton School placed 31 of its graduates at Goldman Sachs – exactly the same number as the much lesser-known and Mormon-affiliated Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management?
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