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

(Penguin, $28)

Here we go again, said Richard Kim in The Nation. Amy Chua, the Yale law professor whose “emotionally sadistic parenting techniques” inspired mothers across America to transform themselves into “tiger moms,” apparently decided she hadn’t spread enough toxicity. The follow-up to her Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother turns out to be so incendiary that it reads less like a work of social science than “an epic feat of trolling.” Written with her husband, it claims to explain the economic and academic success of certain immigrant and religious groups within America. Sure, it might seem reassuring that if you lined up those eight groups they’d “resemble an ’80s Benetton ad.” Unfortunately, Chua and Jed Rubenfeld “traffic in broad stereotypes”—seemingly for no better reason than to stir up trouble.

The book will surely upset many readers, “but it’s not racist,” said Euny Hong in Qz.com. The traits that it claims have fueled the achievements of Jews, Chinese, Indians, Mormons, Lebanese, Iranians, Nigerians, and Cuban exiles aren’t encoded in anyone’s DNA. The “triple package” of the book’s title refers to the propensity of each group to believe in their cultural superiority, to feel they have something to prove, and to value discipline and perseverance above living in the moment (the authors call this “impulse control”). Chua and Rubenfeld “never propose that a given cultural group is superior, simply more fortunately positioned,” said Thomas Flynn in TheDailyBeast.com. Chua might raise hackles, but The Triple Package presents “a fascinating theory,” then defends it with “nuance and sensitivity.”

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The argument doesn’t really hold together, said Olga Khazan in The Atlantic. To prove the superiority of triple-package cultures, the authors cherry-pick anecdotes about immigrant families pushing their children toward success and contrast them with “comical stereotypes” of the self-esteem-boosting parents who supposedly fill America’s white middle class. Worse, Chua and Rubenfeld spend only one chapter describing the downside to growing up in a triple-package household, even though “it’s a pretty big downside”: Anxiety levels and the incidence of depression appear to be higher among immigrants—problems traceable to lower self-esteem. While “most white, middle-class Americans don’t fight for their lives the way triple-package cultures do,” that’s because they can afford to define success not as climbing the income ladder but as achieving happiness. There’s no shame in pursuing a different goal.