I’ve been wondering about this Amy Chua phenomenon. If you haven’t heard, she is a professor of law at Yale University who authored a bestseller in 2011 on the virtues of obsessive child-rearing by domineering Chinese mothers, a.k.a. Tiger Moms.

This book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” immediately sparked controversy because of its highly self-assured parenting style, which was viewed skeptically by many. Notwithstanding this controversy, or precisely because of it, the book sold extremely well. This in turn appears to have prompted Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld, also a professor of law at Yale, to put out a sequel, “The Triple Package,” published in 2014 and reviewed earlier this year in the Falcon’s Feb. 14 issue.

The second book is even more controversial than the first: It provides a recipe for cultural transcendence. What is the “triple package”? Chua and Rubenfeld define it as comprising a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control. That’s it, and you are on your way to breeding a superior culture.  Nothing about enjoying what you do, pursuing your passion or helping others.

“The Triple Package”  claims to codify traits of the following cultures that the authors consider most successful in the American milieu: Chinese, Jewish, Indian, Iranian, Lebanese, Nigerian, Cuban and Mormon.

Chua and Rubenfeld offer some statistics, but mainly anecdotal evidence, to claim that it is the “triple package” that has led to the success of these cultures as measured by their educational,  financial and occupational attainment.  But the authors’ suspect methodology brings into question their conclusions.

First, Chua and Rubenfeld do not establish correlation. They fail to show that each of their supposedly successful groups embodies each of the three traits. Their evidence is based on individual case studies, like when they describe how Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor overcame her circumstances, whereas rigorous research requires data sampling across large populations not only of cultures they perceive as successful, but also of those that they don’t.  Anecdotes make for good dinner conversation, but not for good science.  

Next, even if Chua and Rubenfeld established correlation, which they do not, correlation does not imply causation.  How do we know that it is these traits that led to any group’s success? 

To take a recent example, Steve Jobs, not a member of any of these ethnic communities but an astounding success, was a complete jerk.  He denied fathering a child he knew to be his just to avoid child support, and he lied to his buddy and former partner, Steve Wozniak, about what they were getting paid for joint work. 

One could argue that Jobs’s success was in part due to his sneakiness and dishonesty and that these traits are as  disproportionately present in any successful group as is any component of Chua and Rubenfeld’s triple package. 

Third, Chua and Rubenfeld’s generalizations fail to acknowledge the diversity within each community. Surely, not all Chinese moms are tiger moms, as Chua would have us believe.  To me it appears likely, for instance, that most if not all Chinese American Nobel Prize winners did not “benefit” from status-conscious tiger moms.  I am going by the mere fact that none of these winners attended an Ivy League or similar “elite” school for their undergraduate studies, which I suspect most or all could have if they had been driven toward that goal by their moms.   

The most important flaw of the book, however, may be that  Chua and Rubenfeld do not measure upward mobility as a metric of success — that is, they do not measure the likelihood of children moving into a higher socio-economic-educational strata of society than that they were born into as a metric of success.

The authors instead compare different groups’ incomes, test scores, and educational and occupational attainments directly  — conspicuously failing to acknowledge that an accomplishment is more significant when attained  by someone who started out with less.

Professors Ming Zhao of UCLA and Jennifer Lee of UC Irvine argue precisely this. Lee proffers in Zócalo Public Square that Mexican Americans are the most successful immigrants in America when one measures success based on upward mobility.  The groups identified by Chua and Rubenfeld are mistakenly deemed more “successful” precisely because they ignore the substantial advantages that children in these groups have over others in regard to the education and wealth of their families. 

Unlike earlier Falcon reviewers, I find this book a racist screed that stereotypes every culture — both the ones the authors commend and the ones they implicitly denigrate — on the basis of hunches and anecdotes, rather than by careful analysis and study.

If you want to succeed, here is my triple package for you: Work hard, persevere and enjoy what you do. 

If you don’t believe me, ask your parents. Regardless of their ethnicity, your successful parents will concur.