'Tiger Mom' Amy Chua back with 'The Triple Package'

THE TRIPLE PACKAGE: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. Penguin Press, 320 pp., $27.95.

More than two centuries ago, our Founding Fathers declared that all humans are born with the same inherent potential.

Now, married Yale law professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld have stepped forward to say that being "created equal" doesn't matter. Instead, their controversial (and sometimes cringe-inducing) new book, "The Triple Package," argues that our cultural background largely determines our fate.

The luckiest Americans, they say, are born with "The Triple Package," a set of values handed down to them by their families. Chua and Rubenfeld know this could make them sound "un-American," but they don't care. Chua's contentious previous book, "The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," seems to have emboldened the authors.

"The reality, uncomfortable as it may be to talk about, is that some religious, ethnic and national-origin groups are starkly more successful than others," the two write. They point to Jews, Mormons and immigrants from China, Iran and Nigeria as examples of groups that raise their children with three contradictory but powerful qualities: 1) They believe themselves to be superior to other groups while 2) remaining deeply insecure about their place in American society. And 3) they all impose an extraordinary sense of self-discipline on their children.

The authors make qualifications and exceptions to their basic thesis: Not everyone raised in a Triple Package culture succeeds, they say. And being raised in one can be corrosive to the soul.

What about the many Americans born without the Triple Package? Chua and Rubenfeld do their best to tiptoe around some minefields. If the Triple Package isn't present in the culture of black Americans, it's because "the United States did everything it could for centuries to grind the Triple Package out of African American culture -- and is still doing so today," they write.

The book's gravest sin is its refusal to put these groups in economic context. For Chua and Rubenfeld, the '80s and '90s were times of plenty because many Americans got filthy rich. But a vast literature has shown how fiscal austerity and de-industrialization ravaged the middle class during this era.

"The Triple Package" is a grim book, a scolding rebuke about the softening of America dressed up in pseudo-academic arguments. It will convince few and offend many, though one senses the authors believe themselves to be too special to care.