The Triple Package Read Online Free

thesis of this book, these groups lack the Triple Package, but—and this point is so important it needs to be highlighted in advance—the absence of the Triple Package was not the original cause of their poverty. In almost every case,America’s persistently low-income groups became poor because of systematic exploitation, discrimination, denial of opportunity, and institutional or macroeconomic factors having nothing to do with their culture.
    Moreover, in some cases, a group’s lack of the Triple Package was America’s doing. Centuries of slavery and denigration can make it difficult, if not impossible, for a group to have a deeply internalized sense of superiority. At the same time, if members of certain groups learn not to trust the system, if they come to believe that discipline and hard work won’t really be rewarded—if they don’t think that people like them can make it—they will havelittle reason to engage in impulse control, sacrificing present satisfactions for economic success down the road. Thus the same conditions that cause poverty can also grind the Triple Package out of a culture.
    But once that happens, the situation worsens. America’s poorest groups may not have fallen into poverty because they lacked the Triple Package, but now that they do lack it, their problems are intensified and harder to overcome. In these circumstances, it takes much more—more grit, more drive, perhaps a more exceptional individual—to break out.
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    G ROUPS THAT DO ACHIEVE Triple Package success in the United States become enmeshed in a process of creative destruction that will change them irrevocably. America’s own cultural antibodies invariably attack these groups, encouraging their members to break free from their cultures’ traditional constraints.
    In one possible outcome of this process, the group does so well it simply disappears—as the once-extremely successfulAmerican Huguenot community has all but disappeared. A group’s demise can be celebrated as a triumph of the American melting pot, or mourned as the loss of a heritage and identity, but the bottom line is the same: a successful group, precisely because of its success, assimilates, intermarries, and Americanizes away. Lebanese Americans (who, along with other Arab Americans, haveextremely high out-marriage rates) may be a twentieth-century example of this phenomenon.
    Another possible outcome is decline. Triple Package success is intrinsically hard to sustain. Success softens; it erodes insecurity. Meanwhile, modern principles of equality tend to undercut group superiority complexes. And with its freedom-loving, get-it-now culture, America undercuts impulse control too.WASP economic dominance in the United States declined under the weight of all these pressures.
    Many American Jews today fear the Huguenot outcome—disappearance through assimilation and intermarriage. Perhaps they should be more concerned about the WASP outcome, in which success is followed by decline. As Ellis Island and the Lower East Side recede into the past, and with a strong presence from Washington to Wall Street to Hollywood,Jews may feel less insecure in the United States today than they have been in any country in a thousand years. Moreover, as we’ll discuss later, Jewish culture today appears to be much less oriented around impulse control than it used to be. If so, and if the thesis of this book is correct, continuing Jewish success should not be taken for granted. In fact, mounting evidence today indicates aprecipitous drop in performance among younger Jews across numerous academic activities in which American Jews were once dominant.
    But Triple Package groups are not condemned to either disappearance or decline. Another possibility is more tantalizing andvolatile. As the children of Triple Package groups grow into adults in America, they learn to question what their family’s culture has taught them about who they are and how they should live. They begin to