In 2015, NYT Columnist David Brooks and Yale Law School Professors Jed Rubenfeld, and Amy Chua were invited to Shabtai to speak about the triple package.
The Triple Package with David Brooks & Professors Jed Rubenfeld and Amy Chua
Transcript | 2015
Jordan Hirsch: Tonight's topic is the triple package. And for those of you who are familiar with the basic argument, it's that there are three ingredients to success among certain groups, cultural groups, in American society, which is insecurity, superiority complex, and a basic ability to defer gratification. And so this touches on any number of different themes about culture and people, and some would say race, others would say not. So I'm going to start with a very easy question why does culture matter? Why don't we start. Who wants to take it first?
Jed Rubenfield: You know, people have been puzzling about group success for a long time. Thousands of years. Even the ancient Greeks had their own theories, basically environmental. And that is, they thought that if you were raised under a certain sun that pretty much governed what kind of person you would end up being. And they actually had theories of group success based on that kind of account. And those kind of environmentalist theories actually persisted for thousands of years. But like stepping way back to a huge level of abstraction, there's basically three ways to try to understand this puzzling phenomenon of group differential success and people have been noticing this for a long time. Max Weber's actually the first one to systematically write about this phenomenon in his famous book Protestant Ethic, which is all about why Protestants and Catholics in America and Europe all over the world, as Weber saw it. And he gave a cultural explanation. But there's three basic possible explanations. There's nature, structure and nurture. And nature, we would say biology, genetics. And a lot of people think that's really what's going on. We don't think that. But that would be one account, by the way, a cultural explanation of group success doesn't necessarily displace these other. It might just add to them. But so there's nature, structure. By that I mean institutions, how society is structured. And that's really what explains everything. And there are many people who believe that. That oh no, the whole reason why some groups do better than others in the Untied States, or some groups outperform the rest of the country.
Jed Rubenfield: It's all about institutions, bias, discrimination, and other structural factors of class inheritance. The third, nurture, is really that's where we feel culture comes in and we use culture in a kind of funny way in our book, if you read our book, not that everybody here would have done that. But we use culture in much more expansively. It wouldn't necessarily fit with the experts definitions of that. Sociologists, anthropologists. We include a kind of psychology of upbringing in our culture. And to those three explanations, you also have to include a fourth for our purposes, which is immigrant selectivity, which is what a lot of people also think that can account for some of these phenomena. We I don't want to talk any more about. We can show you that these other explanations cannot satisfactorily explain the phenomenon we're looking at. I'm going to stop now, but it's like it's just we're just blinding ourselves if we think that culture has nothing to do with it. I mean, it's just a fact that by the age of three or 4 or 5, sometimes 12 or 13, some kids in the United States have huge advantages because of the way they're raised, because of their cultural communities in which there is- we've noticed for a long time there's such a thing as an economic playing field that's not level. We all know about that. Our book is about the cultural playing field, and our book is about leveling the cultural playing field. I think that's one way of looking at it.
Amy Chua: Well, David, what do you think? I mean, you're good at that.
David Brooks: That's it. That's all you got?
Amy Chua: No, I mean, I don't want to just, you know, repeat what Jed said. I mean, it's been interesting that this book has been so controversial, you know, because Jed just ran through. We get all kinds of secret emails from people with, well, way more controversial stuff. And so, no, I mean, it's interesting. Yeah, it's, I don't know. I don't want to just repeat what Jed said, but it seems to me that in some ways, a lot of the people that are saying, oh my God, you're making a cultural stereotype. Like here's one thing that has been said. You know, it took me a while to even understand it because the charges of cultural racism, I just when I kind of read it carefully, it was if you say that, you know, make a statement like Asian Americans, I'll just make this up, you know, study, spend 70% more time doing homework and that's why they do better in school. That seems like a no brainer that you should be able to say that. But that is one of the things that is said to be making a cultural stereotype, to say that Asian - I'm sorry, cultural racism - that some groups are doing, engaging in behavior that is leading them to be more successful.
Amy Chua: And this is why it's confusing to me, because I feel like it's actually a very politically correct and sort of more humanizing thing, which is like, this is accessible. It's not worth saying. It's not genetic. I mean, we don't get into it. Like, I think the triple package is consistent with that, which some genetic accounts just were not. That's not our theory. That is, if some groups were to have a were to be genetically superior, that would could contribute to their superiority complex. But that's not what we say. So to me, it's the kind of politically correct view which is like, you can't talk about this. You know, it's all discrimination. It's actually much more dehumanizing because it's like it's essentially saying that poor groups, poor societies, poor communities have no agency over what they can do. There is nothing they can do. Because if you think it's all oh, the only reason the Cubans are rich is because they came over with doctors kids. And the only reason these people are poor is because there discrimination. There is literally nothing an individual family can do. An individual teacher can do, an individual person can do so. So that's why I think Jed put it very nicely. The way we're using culture is not, and we do a giant two page footnote, is not some essentialist like, oh, Hindu culture. That only people from this, you know, continent can have for some 3000 year Confucian tradition.
Amy Chua: It's really a set of behaviors and mentality and just kind of yeah, really behaviors and attitude that I think can be imparted to anybody, you know. And so we dare to say the wild thing that certain behaviors and attitudes lead to more, let's say, academic success or economic success. To me, it's astonishing that that is controversial. You know, like you talk to school teachers, public school teachers. I'll just say this one thing and then I'll let David talk up. I've been saying this a little bit on TV, but it's a true- I got an email from a public Hispanic, Mexican-American public high school teacher in Southern California, and he said, you know, I just read the triple package or whatever the article, and it's so interesting. And he said, I just can't understand all this controversy. I'm a public high school teacher, and I think about culture and success all the time. I look around at my students and my Asian immigrant students, some of them incredibly poor, like their parents are illiterate. Just study differently. They have different attitudes that clearly results in them doing better at school. So what he said to me. So I told my son, my Mexican American son, we're going to copy everything they're doing, you know? And the email was like, and my son is a straight-A student. He just got this scholarship to Fullerton, whatever. And that's all we mean by culture, right? That there are. And that's what I mean by I don't think it should be so controversial like, this is and I'm not trying to say that everybody can do this like any inner city. Of course, this the hill is much deeper for some, and for some people will be impossible. It's ridiculous to say just study two two hours more. Um, but for some not insignificant portion of the population, I think this is just more information that they can choose to take advantage of or not.
David Brooks: Okay, so I guess the way I would express it is I'm going to get the numbers wrong because I haven't looked at this research for a long time. But one way of thinking about human cognition is that the human mind can process about 4 million bits of information a minute of which we're consciously aware of, say, 150. So most of our cognition is unconscious. And this has everything to do with the way the eye moves, the way the eye perceives the scene, the way we emotionally respond to something, who we're attracted to, how we attach, how we're motivated. I mean, a zillion things are going on unconsciously in every second, which are structured below the level of awareness. And all of these things that have been structured below the level of awareness are structured through history, through time and the stuff that got structured millions or hundreds of thousands of years ago, which is based in baked into our epigenetics, we call evolution. The stuff that was structured thousands of years ago, we call religion. The stuff that was structured hundreds of years ago, we call culture or history. The stuff that was structured decades ago, we call family. The stuff that was structured last few years, we call education. We have different names for all these things that have happened historically to structure the way we frame our thinking in the world. And so it's all gone into us and goes through us and how we perceive and talk and the language we use in a zillion different ways. And so to me, it's obvious that all these things are involved. And anybody who's Jewish frankly looks in their own lives and sees how certain historic Jewish patterns have, have created this, you know, overrepresentation in various spheres.
David Brooks: And to me, it's obviously and there's no regularity. It's going to be culture is going to be dominant in one moment, less dominant in another moment. If I come with a strong egalitarian culture, but somebody offers me $1 billion while I'm going to take the billion dollars, so then it's not culture. So it's highly fluid. And the way, unfortunately, this fluid series of influences, which are all part of a single river, eventually, when we talk about it in the American ideological context, the debate has been distorted by Marxism. So to me, Marxism came in and said, we have an economic explanation for why people are behaving. If you're saying it's culture or family structure that made you on the right, it's obviously the interplay between these two things. But somehow it got divided if you were talking about culture, that meant you were against economic responses. And I saw it happen when Sam Huntington had a book a couple of years ago, it was called Culture Matters. Yeah, Culture Matters, and I've seen it happen to your book. I've seen it happen to book after book that if you mention culture, it's taken as an assault on something it's not really an assault on. And to me, the resolution is found in this favorite saying of mine from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which is the central conservative truth is that culture matters most. And the central liberal truth is that government can change culture. It seems to me both these things are true. And so that's the way I look at it.
Jordan Hirsch: All right. Ask a little bit about how American society can actually sustain a triple packaged culture if traditional institutions, which are often the vector for the triple package church, synagogue, cultural norms, kind of through different kinds of communities. Those seem to be falling apart across the country. Synagogue attendance is down. Church attendance is down. Belief in God is down. How do you transmit these values in a time of increasing individuality? In a time when it seems increasingly that millennials and those younger are wedded to an idea of life is more of a journey and an individual kind of pursuit, and not structured toward any kind of rules or history or culture.
Amy Chua: So the book is actually a pretty complicated book, the art, our particular thesis. It's a little bit more of a celebration of this, a kind of a process of creative destruction. So isn't, despite the media, it isn't just straight. These groups that have this are awesome. You know. And to the extent that their kids start to lose it, that's all bad. And there's a little bit of that. Right. But it's so the what we'll call let me call the first generation. In the case of Mormons, it's, you know, it's not an immigrant group, but like the group that feels these things most intensely. In immigrant groups, it's often the immigrant. So in my case, like the Chinese, my parents, these immigrants from China, they are like so triple pack, you know. I mean, they, my parents, it's not- again, I don't I think with this card I don't need to do all the stereotypes, the caveats. Obviously, I'm not talking about every single Chinese person, tons of exceptions or whatever. But my, so my parents, they, when they were raising me, it was um. Uh, okay. So just a quick story. You know, when I was in fourth grade, there was this kid who was running around making fun of me, like, you know, I had a Chinese accent when I was growing up, which I got rid of, but making slanty eyes or whatever, and I came.
Amy Chua: He was just kind of bullying me. And I came home and I told my mom about this, and my mom was. I'll never forget this. She was mad at me. Okay. So what she said was, she's like, why would you care about this person? Like, why were you even thinking about this? And then she went on, like, we come from like the oldest, greatest, most magnificent civilization, like, you know, you know, whatever. And if this person, like, why would you even waste your time thinking, you know. And so there's the reason I'm bringing this up is in her statement, we come from the greatest, oldest, most smartest, best people, there is, of course, an ethnocentrism. And there is something that is that we rightfully in America are uncomfortable with. And that's why I'm saying it's not a pure celebration. Right. So that first generation and you know why my mother and these people have it because they're outsiders here. So it's like the shield. Like they may be making fun of me. They may not. They may think my accent is funny, but I, you know, this is where I come from.
Amy Chua: So my mother giving that to me actually just gave me a kind of armor. Right? So I go out into the world and it doesn't always work, but whatever. I look a little funny. I have an accent. I'm just not. I'm still an immigrant's kid. That is like this ethnic armor and Helene Cooper, Liberian American, right, uses almost the exact same language when she's talking about how she's facing race discrimination. Like she had come from the I think it's the Congo people in Liberia. Again, reflects this whole hierarchy and lots of ethnocentrism that is not all good from the old country, but coming to America in the face of racism, this proud identity of we are the best people serves this armor. So and then you couple that with. So Jordan, the reason I'm going into this is I think there is something I think America's strength actually, is this generational- it could be declined, but interdynamic so the first generation comes like that and they're like, they have- and then their children, the second generation, we're taught about equality, which is great. That's America's greatest value. Right. So so they resist. So they don't like the superiority complex is already a little bit diluted. They may not even know what China looks like.
Amy Chua: It's just like rings a little more false. Right. Insecurity starts to go down the more you get assimilated, you know? So this is like the classic generational decline. But that's not all bad for a couple of reasons. One thing we say about the triple package is when you have this kind of this dynamic of the superiority complex, with this insecurity, we're outsiders, we have to show everybody we are not respected enough. It does produce drive and what we say is success. But it also can. This was true of the Jews early on. It's true of the first generation Chinese. It's true of almost any immigrant group that first gets here. Those parents tend to have very narrow views of success. Right. Because first they're afraid that they can't survive. And secondly, they want to gain the respect of all their friends in the community. So it's pretty funny how the Chinese I often used to say, the Chinese are three generations behind the Jews. If you look at these early accounts in the Lower East Side, Alfred Kazin story, it's like everybody had to be you have to be a doctor or a lawyer. You have to get straight A's. And you can only play the piano or the violin.
Audience: I promise that hasn't changed.
Amy Chua: No, I think it has changed. Like I know, multiple, multiple. So that's- but I think it's a good thing when the next generation rebels against that. Like why only the piano or the violin? Why do I have to be a doctor? Why? You know, so you have a little bit more comfort. And so I think America actually it's not such a simple story. A little bit of the decline less also has like this kind of creative, positive stuff. So I didn't answer it directly, but that was just the first thing that came.
David Brooks: I guess I would say, well, think about American culture. Alexis de Tocqueville came here in the 1830s and described a certain American culture. Most of us had no ancestors here then, and yet we still read de Tocqueville, because the American culture he describes in the 1830s is still basically our culture. And it rings true to us time and time again. So that shows the long historical continuity of cultures. Now, of course, cultures can change and do change. There's a guy named Lawrence Harrison who describes how sometimes they can change after a shock. You can get a new education system, a new parental style. But nonetheless, I'd say there are just long historical continuities, even with falling synagogue attendance or whatever. So say the case of Jewish continuity. I would explain the Jewish focus on achievement, and believe me, there's downsides to long historical forces. One, a belief in a law giving God. This is centuries of thousands of years old this belief. A belief that an essential justice to history. If you work hard, you get rewards. That you can control your own destiny. These are not universal things, but they happen to have been baked into the Torah. I would say, finally, the lack of ability to own property probably plays a role. This is me. Totally immature and so forth. There's a theory that Jews tended to live in what they call Burgess, spots where civilizations met, and that created an extra creativity. And then we had the immigrant thing. And so, I don't know, I got your galleys like three months before publication. And it rang totally true to my personal experience.
David Burk: I described it to numerous friends over dinner parties. It rang true to everybody's experience. I'd say it rings true to everybody's experience. The factors you guys talked about. But then it gets into the political more. But you can have change. Jews can change. They can go to synagogue. But certain cultural things are so deeply baked into child rearing attitudes that I think they linger for centuries and centuries. Just I don't know what you guys think of this example, but I did some research on this or reported some research on this, and I mentioned eye movements. And so there are a couple of studies of this. They take Americans and Chinese people and have them look at a fish tank, and the Chinese eyes move across the fish tank. Look at all the vegetation in the tank, how the fish are all moving. The American eyes just pick out the biggest fish because we just have more individualistic frame. And a similar study, they took tourists looking at the Mona Lisa and they measured their eye saccades, the movement of these eyes. And once again, the Chinese eyes were going all over the painting. The American eyes were looking at eyes and mouth, just much more focused visual patterns. And so that's something you can actually see and measure. That's cultural based on a more individualistic thing. And then the Americans were much more perceptive about her mouth and her eyes. But the Asian eyes were more contextual. And so that's something that you could measure and test and get data out of. And it's a measurable unconscious cultural bias.
Jed Rubenfield: Well, so the first thing I want to say is thank you to David Brooks for, you know, just for being here and talking about our book, but I forgot what a pleasure it is to listen to you so. But so kind of generalizing the question you asked and what you're saying, it's a little bit inside baseball. Like if you haven't read our book, I don't know if what I'm about to say is going to make any sense, but so what we describe as the triple package is definitely at odds with central tenets of contemporary American progressive thinking. One thing that these group superiority complexes definitely run into a huge like, American, you know, battering rams. Like there's no such thing as group superiority. There's no such thing. Now we celebrate this. We're not against it. But that means that American culture is always going to be, to some extent, at odds with, you know, I don't know if secularization people are not going to synagogue is like the core beliefs that, you know, that the whole package rests on run against core beliefs of American culture, some of which we should and do support. But anyway, so inaudible runs up against the contemporary American. Just feel good about herself. And impulse control kind of runs up against, you know, an American just do what you want. Right now. Live in the present. Instant gratification. So some of the things that collides against are great.
Jed Rubenfield: We shouldn't believe in groups, and that's probably a bad thing to believe in. But these other two things that have pulled America away from its own triple package, I think maybe. I think what we say in our book is we shouldn't necessarily, maybe it's time to work our claw our way back a little bit. So we discussed a national triple package and these group triple packages. And you know, you could say the national triple is just like a metaphor. But we met this triple package set of ideas to be much more broadly applicable, not just ethnic groups but many other different kinds of groups too. And tonight as well, we have a chapter which we say that America had these triple package values in spades at the time of its founding. I mean, America always had a huge superiority complex. It had this big chip on its shoulder and this Tocqueville insecurity of individual success and failure from the get go and also from the Puritan inheritance. This is the several hundred year, you know, cultural history. It had a lot of impulse control. And we think that we've moved away from some of those in some respects. And but, you know, at a national level and I'll stop here. But could you have a national superiority complex that was inclusive and not like the ethno ones that are actually, in some ways, prejudiced and intolerant?
Jed Rubenfield: All the groups, very complex really have a danger of really being just very prejudiced. We think at a national level you can. It's an advantage in a national security complex. It's possible, in theory, for the nation's security complex to be based on its inclusivity and its tolerance, democracy, hard work, a lot of things that are not ethnically divisive. And so, of course, we argue that if America could get its triple package back the way to aspire, the reason to be behind that, if we are to favor that would be only if America can define its spirit, not in terms of like belligerence and imperialism, but more in these sort of typical liberal terms that I just mentioned.
Jordan Hirsch: So I think it's a good time to open it up for a couple of questions and we'll, we can move upstairs.
Question: So how would you say that you have, you know, the triple package and whatnot be a turn into a positive direction for society? And what what would you say is something concrete that could be done over the next over, you know, the coming years, as opposed to just kind of having it be a shibboleth for like one viewpoint or another?
Amy Chua: Um, so impulse control is the easy way to answer this. And here we're on, I think, not very controversial ground. There are these studies that show that this is the one that whatever deferred gratification, perseverance, grit. These are things that can be instilled in anybody but that it has to be done at a young age, which goes back to this why it's cultural- like it's own family. So you start when they're 14 then. So one concrete thing is this our book is consistent with the people who want a certain form of early intervention.
Amy Chua: Other concrete things I don't want to- it isn't a how to book. Okay. So and that's very important because when David said it's you were a little reference of Jewish success, but not all good. This is where it relates to the Tiger Mom book. Right? I think this was in the New York Times excerpt we had. But one thing that I find very interesting is there's the insecurity that some people feel via the society. Right. So you're- I'm a Mormon. People don't quite. They say we're not Christian, right? Or. Oh, no, no, I thought you were okay. Oh, yeah.
Amy Chua: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Jed Rubenfield: Oh you are? Oh I'm sorry.
Jed Rubenfield: I don't know what anybody's talking about at this point. Okay. Let's have a conversation system. Yeah. No.
Amy Chua: Okay. How did you know?
Amy Chua: Or almost any immigrant or when Jed said we meant it to be more flexible. Believe it or not, a lot of my students, we were almost going to include a section on how the package the book applies to gays specifically, specifically, and I'll talk about that later. But so there's insecurity via the rest of society. But one there's another form of insecurity that I think is quite provocative, and this is an insecurity created within the family. And this is basically talk about anathema. These are this is basically parents conveying to their children the idea that you're not good enough yet. Jordana is looking at her mom. No, but what's interesting is embedded in the concept of high expectations is both the superiority complex and insecurity, because it has this. When you have very high expectations for your child, you're conveying to them, I know you can be the best, right? That's the superiority part. It's not like a- but it's also but you're not close yet. You're not there yet. You know. So we run through in the Asian case that I know best. It's- these are lots of studies like we run through all these studies about how. So this is so anathema to popular Western thinking, the idea of parents making their children feel not good enough yet. And there's a pathologist, and we have a whole chapter exploring the negatives of this. You know, Amy Chan basically said she just wanted to die all the time. That she just hated.
Amy Chua: Her mother made her feel, you know, it was really, really bad. But so high expectations means, you know, the joke. You know why just an A? Not an A+? You're not good enough yet. And then in these Asian studies, it's also interesting they show that East Asian families, immigrants are much more likely to make comparisons with everyone else's super successful kids. That is, you know, like, oh, you know, your cousin just got into Harvard, and, Joan's friend just got into, you know, valedictorian, which is also kind of a no no when the parent. So this is like, look, everybody else is doing better. And then again, in the East Asian context, there's the family honor thing, which is, you know, if you don't do well at school, you're going to let down the whole family. So I'm going into this. So I feel like there must be some when you ask, like, what is there to be done? You know, there's the extreme of like, you're never good enough, which I don't think any of us would want to make our children affirmatively feel that way. And we talk about the anxiety and the depression. And a lot of the anger directed at the Tiger Mom book was from people who were raised in these households and just didn't feel that their parents loved them, that it was all about success, success, success. Now, it's not always like that, you know. But at the other extreme of, I think where America's gone to is it used to be okay to say, son, I'm disappointed in you.
Amy Chua: There's like Abe Lincoln's letter from, you know. So I think we've moved to the other extreme of you're not good enough, which is you're amazing, you know, like, you don't have to worry about anything or you're perfect just the way you are. And I think that's a bit of a- it's a false message to give to our children in this day and age where it is not true. They're going to come out and it's hard to get jobs. It is not true. It's a tough world out there. And if you just say, just pursue your dreams, just do whatever, it's all going to be good. At some point it's going to hit them. So anyway, when you- so I talked about impulse control, concrete things to do I think on this insecurity point, it's not as easy a how to, you know, it's not like, hey everybody just make your kids feel insecure. I don't think so. But it's can we not have higher expectations? Can we not, you know, is there something not something in between the extreme of you're never good enough and, you know, you never you have you don't have to impress anyone. You have nothing to- you don't have to show anyone. This is the idea of proving yourself. I think it's a very American idea. Like there are lots of the idea. Like you need to prove yourself.
Amy Chua: I always thought that sounded good. You know, like, prove yourself to your country, to your classmates, to your parents. But that's, like, got a whole negative connotation in the parenting idea. Now you're saying that they have to prove themselves like they're not good enough already? Nothing's good enough for you? You know, it's like such a slippery slope.
Jordan Hirsch: Let's get one more question, and I think we'll move upstairs. Yeah. Uh, Josh.
Question: So sort of maybe piggybacking on that question. I would think that your thesis doesn't run up against an insecurity problem in American society, but runs up against the like, especially amongst, I would suspect, sort of inner city communities, a lack of a superiority complex that there are so many. I- professor Rubinfeld was talking about structural or systemic barriers to success, that I'm curious how sort of the triple package qualities can stack up, how they can outweigh the balance against those structural inequities. And you mentioned how I remember you mentioned just now that the- your parents and many immigrant communities are incredibly poor. They are impoverished. They are- their parents often are illiterate. And so I'm trying. I'm wondering what you think. You know, you could see those two scenarios, illiterate, poor immigrants and inner city youth as being somewhat similar and yet you're seeing different patterns of achievement. And I'm wondering where you think the difference lies.
Jed Rubenfield: Well, there's there's so much to be said here, but I mean, I mean, the main point is, you know, the fundamental causes of poverty in America's inner cities and elsewhere, like Appalachia. We're talking about communities where poverty is most entrenched, are structural. They're not cultural. They're, um-.
Amy Chua: The original causes.
Jed Rubenfield: Hundreds of years of slavery, exclusion, bias and the erosion of the whole, you know, economic sector, manufacturing jobs, other jobs. So we all know that. And this gets back to what David was saying earlier, these things. Let's not get caught in a false dichotomy. We know that these are hugely important. And if we don't correct some of these things, there will be no chance. But let's not assume that that's all there is, that those are the only causes on our view,. Those same things that cause such a cause poverty over time and cause poverty to to be so widespread in these groups and can also have culturally damaging effects that were intended by Americans to crush the superiority story out of a certain group. And you see this both in Appalachia and Appalachia and in America's inner cities. And on our view, these culturally damaging effects further entrench poverty. They didn't cause it. They weren't the causes of poverty, but they further entrenched. They make it harder to. It's very now, you know, I mean, families can have their own superiority stories. People can write their own scripts and families can can defy the master narrative that some society is trying to impose on. But it's just much harder. It's way easier for that family culture to buy into a superior race, or for your mom to tell you that if that's what she learned, and that's what everybody else in the community thinks, and she has all this reverence for it, and it's just much harder.
Amy Chua: Can I just two quick things. Really interesting question. So there's this- everybody knows about the famous marshmallow test, but I think the most interesting study we describe is what we're calling the reverse marshmallow test. So the marshmallow test was the Stanford test, where you ask the kid you want one marshmallow now, or if you wait 15 minutes, you get two. And it turns out that all the kids that had the deferred gratification who waited for two, if you track them 30 years later, were wildly more successful in every dimension like health, marriage, money, education, everything. So they recently ran this test, again with a twist. This is at Rochester a couple of years ago. They first took half the kids and they lied to them. So they took and they said, like, if you do some stuff, we're going to give you these cool art supplies. And then they just didn't follow through. They broke the promise. And then they ran the marshmallow test. You know, they're like, okay, do you want one marshmallow now or do you want to wait 15 for two? Every single person who had been lied to grabbed the first marshmallow. Right. And that makes total sense. The point of this is if you don't trust your institutions, like if you feel like, no, I'm going to- it's rational to grab the first thing. So going back to your comparison, it is interesting that a lot of the immigrants who come, maybe because they come from so much more terrible countries, right? You come from places with much more corruption, much more poverty, much. Even if you if you come here and you know, the playing field is not that even you, maybe you get discrimination or whatever, but you just so much more believe in the system.
Amy Chua: This is a feature of immigrants. They believe that that hard work will translate. And I think one thing going back to I've talked to some educators is it's really hard if you're talking about inner city kids. You know, there's one kid who was saying, like, why one of my students, Kennedy, was did this education long, long thing in public schools. And she was trying to talk about the value of education and working hard. And somebody just one girl said, I don't know what you're saying. You know, my mother, you know, killed herself, worked two jobs to put herself through high school, and she's still on welfare. Like, why should I work hard now? It just it doesn't translate like for them the economic and educational institutions haven't, haven't, you know. So then it's going to be hard to have the impulse control and all this stuff.
Jordan Hirsch: David, any any final thoughts?
David Burk: Well, just on, poverty, you know, obviously the decline of skilled, uh, unskilled labor is a gigantic contributor to the what we call urban poverty today. But I do think there are some semi-independent and obviously it's the interplay between that and culture which contribute to poverty today. I do think there are some independent, strictly cultural variables at play. One is the social trust issue. If you ask people, can you trust most people around you, people with college degrees, high degrees of social trust, people without low degrees, and that has concrete effects. Edward Banfield, the famous studies of why does southern Italians much poorer than northern Italians? And it was because southern Italians had tremendous trust within the family, very low trust outside of the family, and therefore their companies would grow until they employed all their family members. They just couldn't employ anybody else because they didn't trust them. And so social trust is a huge cultural shift. That would probably has an influence. Second, I would say the shift in attitudes. And there's been a ton of work on this between what they call a keystone marriage and a capstone marriage, and people have certain life scripts in their heads. In what order do you do things? You graduate from high school, you get married, you have kids, or you graduate from high school, you get married, you get a job, you have kids. That's one life script. There's another life script, which is more common today. You graduate from high school, maybe, you get a job, you have kids, and then when you can afford the nice wedding, then you get married.
David Brooks: So the wedding is a capstone, not a keystone. And I fundamentally just my opinion. I'm a journalist. I think that's a screwed up life script. I think it's you're much better off getting married first to have some mutual support. And so that's one thing then how we raise kids. I highly recommend this book by a woman named Annette Lareau who basically spent 19 years, basically her whole career, sitting in people's living rooms or in the back seats of the car, observing parenting styles. And she says, there's not a continuum of parenting styles in this country. There's a dichotomy and a polarization that some people are raised and this is a style probably most of us were raised in. God knows your kids, and it's called concerted cultivation. And that's, you know, where we have little charts on the weekend, driving schedules as we're driving them here and there. And then and these kids are raised to it's a much more high pressure style of childhood, but it sort of pays off in the long term. Then there's another childhood, which she says is generally among the working class, and she doesn't break it down by. She just does it by income groups, not by culture or ethnic group. But it's, you know, life is hard. Enjoy it. Enjoy your childhood. And she says the childhoods of the working class is a much happier childhood, a much more relaxed childhood, and much more refreshing childhood than the kids who are being driven around from mobile practice to SAT prep.
David Burk: But, so at 18, the kids who were or they say at 16 or 12, the kids in the working class are just happier. They're more spontaneous. They're more fun to be around. By 25, it should shifts. And the kids who haven't had the high pressure childhood just have been prepared for our system. And so that's the one thing. The one final thing I'd say is cultures are not arbitrary. They are answers to problems faced by that group of people at a time. And so we've had cultures which were faced with the problem of working on a farm, and we developed a culture for dealing with those problems. We had a culture just to go to the self-esteem point. We had a culture faced with working on really hard conditions without a social safety net. And we created a culture you better not fuck up. And it was a much harsher parenting culture. But then along comes the 1960s and 1970s and our culture had a different problem. The problem was we had large numbers of people, minorities, women and others who had been taught to teach, to think too lowly of themselves. So we shifted our culture to solve that problem, and we built up a self-esteem movement. So people had been taught to think too lowly of themselves, thought adequately themselves. And now I'd say we've gone a little over overboard on self-esteem stuff. But cultures aren't arbitrary. They're solutions to problems and sometimes the problem shifts. It takes a little while for culture to catch up.
Jordan Hirsch: Speaking of shifts, we'll continue the conversation upstairs. For all of you who didn't get to ask, don't worry, we'll get everything in. So thank you so much for the recording. And everyone. There'll be little place cards with names on it. Just circle around the table and find where you're at. Yeah.