The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

As a result, America’s Triple Package drive and ambition also contributed to some of the darkest stains on American history: at least two centuries of race slavery and, even after the Civil War, another century of segregation, violence, and systemic discrimination; the decimation, subjugation, and relocation of Native Americans, including the forced and fatal march of several tribes halfway across the continent in the 1830s; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; and the forgotten lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans well into the twentieth century.

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  BUT FOR THOSE WHOM America’s Triple Package benefited, it was an engine of extraordinary potency. The American Triple Package was not the same as the Puritans’. Infused with the American desire to live in the present, it was both more materialist and more rule-breaking.

  This gave the American Triple Package a distinctive character. It was as liberating as it was constraining. In some Triple Package cultures, the path prescribed for individuals is rigidly conventional and risk-averse. America’s Triple Package was different.

  Americans want to make the world anew—in every generation. Long after Jefferson said the “earth belongs to the living,” Henry Ford would famously declare, “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present.” One generation of Americans after another has pushed into new frontiers, torn down the old, created new religions, new rights, and new kinds of commerce, forever engaging in what economists, following Schumpeter, call creative destruction. If America was the quintessential Triple Package country, it was also a country where people constantly climbed the Triple Package ladder only to kick it away—drawing on its drive and discipline to defy convention, to break uncharted ground.

  More than any other country, America managed to fuse two seemingly opposite impulses: Triple Package deferred gratification and living in the present. It did this in part through the alchemy of the American Dream. The formula was simple. Work hard during the week, and you can play hard on the weekend; work hard for years, and you can have the house and cars and family you dreamt of.

  Through this productive fusion, America succeeded in becoming not only the world’s hardest-working country, but, just as famously, the land of letting loose and living in the moment—of Coca-Cola, keggers, and California. An American could live the Triple Package five days a week—but declare independence on Friday afternoon. No other society in history has ever had it more both ways.

  Then, in the latter part of the twentieth century, something happened. America turned against both insecurity and impulse control. With those Triple Package elements gone, what remained was superiority and the desire to live in the present—a formula not for drive, grit, and innovation, but for instant gratification.

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  MANY TODAY CLAIM THAT welfare has destroyed Americans’ work ethic. “Even as the welfare state has improved the material comfort of low-income Americans,” write Robert Rector and Jennifer Marshall of the Heritage Foundation, its “result has been the disintegration of the work ethic.” In Triple Package terms, this argument in essence asserts that welfare eliminated insecurity: freed from the chastening anxiety of starvation, poor Americans live happily on their unemployment checks, watching their flat-screen TVs instead of taking a minimum-wage job at McDonald’s.

  And as a matter of historical fact, the modern American welfare state did originate with the goal of eliminating insecurity. “There is still today a frontier that remains unconquered,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt in a 1938 radio address: “the great, the nation-wide frontier of insecurity, of human want and fear.” In his famous “Second Bill of Rights” speech in 1944, Roosevelt declared that the Constitution had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness”; what America needed was “the freedom from insecurity.” Not for nothing was FDR’s groundbreaking welfare program called Social Security.

  But for members of the comfortable classes to blame America’s decline on the lower classes is, at best, myopic. Lamenting the disintegration of the work ethic in our inner cities when in some Baltimore, Detroit, and New York neighborhoods, the chances of graduating high school are under 50 percent, but gang leaders can earn as much $130,000 a year selling drugs—and die reportedly at the average age of twenty—is missing pretty much everything that’s important about the big picture. So is telling Central Appalachians to stop whining and apply at McDonald’s, when changes in the economy essentially wiped out all the sectors that previously provided livelihoods for entire towns.

  America did lose its insecurity—and hence the Triple Package—in the late twentieth century, but the real culprit was success itself. Insecurity faded because of prosperity, some of it undeserved, but much of it hard-earned and reflecting the best of America—the fact that we have good institutions and great incentives for innovation. All the partisan finger-pointing—It’s welfare! It’s tax cuts! It started with Reagan! No, it’s totally Obama’s fault—detracts from the undisputed most important fact: the extraordinary, inexorable rise in American income and standards of living, both at the top and on average, over the twentieth century, culminating after 1980 in one of the greatest wealth explosions in the history of mankind. The 1980s were so loaded and overloaded that the entire decade came to be symbolized by Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. And the 1990s were astronomically even richer than the decade before.

  With the dot-com boom and the growth of venture capitalism, twentysomethings barely out of college became multimillionaires overnight. Between 1995 and 2000, the stock market tripled, and by 2000, Silicon Valley was producing up to sixty-four new millionaires per day. Corporate compensation soared, but few complained, because employment was strong and shareholder profits were soaring too. People with no special skills or insight suddenly believed they were stock-picking geniuses because everything they bought turned to gold. Across the country, family net worth climbed; by 2007, it was over $120,000—a record high. Homes were worth twice as much as people paid for them only a few years earlier.

  In some ways, perceptions of how flush Americans were in those boom years outran the reality. In fact, the top 1 percent of U.S. earners reaped the lion’s share of the new wealth. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, the vast majority of Americans (all the way down to the eightieth percentile) enjoyed substantial income growth as well, and widely available credit increased ordinary Americans’ spending power beyond their actual income—sometimes well beyond it. At the same time, it’s easy to forget that today’s focus on inequality and skepticism about whether Wall Street riches are good for Main Street were not prevalent in America in the decades before 2008. As economist Robert Shiller observes, “In the boom years of the 1990s, overt resentment by the general public of their own country’s corporations was at a historic low. Businessmen were lionized.”

  Meanwhile, globalization seemed to herald even more money for Americans; it was practically synonymous with the spread of Starbucks, Disney, Coca-Cola, Nike, and the Gap. On top of all this, everyone seemed to revere America. With the collapse of Communism, governments from countries all over the world were suddenly begging U.S. “advisers” (some of whom were still law students at Georgetown) to help them implement U.S.-style constitutions and foreign-investment laws. Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History, positing that Western liberal democracy—with America as Exhibit A—represented the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government.” In the nineties, more than thirty-five countries, including Tanzania and Swaziland, started U.S.-style stock exchanges. The world, it seemed, wanted to be American. The United States was the sole superpower left standing—a “hyperpower,” dominant economically, militarily, and culturally, master of a suddenly unipolar universe.

  All this swelled Americans’ superiority complex, but had the opposite effect on their insecurity. For the first time, the United States had no seriou
s rival or enemy. America had nothing more to prove to the world; on the contrary, the world was scrambling to catch up to America.

  Meanwhile, there were other forces—more personal, more psychological—attacking insecurity in America as well.

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  “I CANNOT THINK of a single psychological problem—from anxiety and depression, to underachievement at school or at work . . . to spouse battering or child molestation . . . —that is not traceable to the problem of low self-esteem,” wrote psychotherapist, Ayn Rand disciple, and father of the American self-esteem movement Nathaniel Branden. It’s an extraordinary fact about Branden’s extraordinary claim that it will strike many American readers as not implausible—as at least arguable. Such has been the astonishing triumph of self-esteem thinking in the United States.

  Branden’s 1969 The Psychology of Self-Esteem became a bestseller. By the 1980s, educators had seized on his ideas, broadening them still further. Not only were all psychological problems caused by a lack of self-esteem; “virtually every social problem can be traced to people’s lack of self-love,” said the reformers. “[M]any, if not most, of the major problems plaguing society have roots in the low self-esteem of many of the people who make up society.”

  Schools all over the United States made it their mission to instill self-esteem in their charges. Parents embraced the same goal. “In the 1990s,” writes psychologist Carol Dweck, “parents and teachers . . . decided that self-esteem was the most important thing in the world—that if a child had self-esteem, everything else would follow.”

  Psychologists had talked about self-esteem before. William James saw its importance in an interesting discussion in 1890. But for James, accomplishment remained central to self-esteem. In the new movement, the causality was reversed: self-esteem was declared necessary to accomplishment. That means self-esteem has to precede achievement. Kids have to be given self-esteem before they’ve achieved anything.

  In other words, the self-esteem movement severed self-esteem from esteem-worthy conduct. If self-esteem is the cure for doing poorly and acting badly, then people must be taught to feel good about themselves—to like themselves, to accept themselves—no matter what they have or haven’t done.

  The self-esteem movement made Americans feel much more satisfied with themselves, but it didn’t cure their psychological, academic, or social problems. In fact, its claims have proved jarringly false.* But it did go a long way toward destroying the Triple Package in everyone who embraced it—and their children.

  The self-esteem movement promotes the exact opposite of Triple Package insecurity. No one should feel that they’re not good enough or that they have to “prove themselves” by doing better; self-acceptance is the first rule of a successful life. This has become the message of an explosion of self-help books, of wildly popular self-improvement “seminars,” and of much psychotherapy as well (a “primary task of psychotherapy is to help strengthen self-esteem,” wrote Branden in 1969). Above all, children must never feel they failed at something or even came in second. Hence the proverbial trophies-for-everyone, the parents who ask teachers not to use red pens because it’s “upsetting to kids when they see so much red on the page,” the ubiquitous “Great job!” and “You’re amazing!”

  At the same time, the self-esteem movement erodes impulse control. “People with incredibly positive views of themselves,” researchers have found, are more willing to “do stupid or destructive things” and more likely to satisfy their own desires even when the “costs are borne by others.” Children brought up in self-esteem-centered schools and families are not taught to endure hardship or to persevere in the face of failure. They’re sheltered from disappointment and rejection by devoted, exhausted parents who monitor their every move, desperate to make their kids feel “special.” They’re encouraged to believe that they have a right to have and do everything they want when they want it—and tend to be frustrated when they can’t.

  The erosion of impulse control in America extends far beyond child rearing. It has affected every domain of life. The 1960s—the ultimate anti-inhibition, live-in-the-moment decade—probably played a role. But more important, once again, was rising affluence. Comfortable people have no pressing, life-threatening reason to exercise discipline and restraint. It’s hard to live like you’re in the Depression when you grow up in the suburbs with two SUVs. The result—when vanishing impulse control combines with diminishing insecurity and excess disposable income—is a society increasingly defined by instant gratification.

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  WE’RE HARDLY THE FIRST to call attention to immediate gratification as a corrosive force in America today, but the facts remain bracing.

  U.S. public debt, which in 1980 was about 30 percent of gross domestic product (roughly the same percentage as in 1790), is today a barely graspable $17 trillion, over 100 percent of GDP. America’s infrastructure, the physical embodiment of a nation’s capacity to invest in its future, was once the envy of the world; today, it earns a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers, including solid Ds for drinking water, hazardous waste, and transit. What’s most surprising is that America’s infrastructure investment declined (as a percentage of GDP) even during the stupendous prosperity of the 1980s and ’90s.

  In the 1960s, the insecurity created by the country’s rivalry with the Soviet Union drove the United States to stay ahead of the world in basic science and cutting-edge technology. Since then, American research and development spending has dropped by over 50 percent (again, as a percentage of GDP). By 2009, Americans were spending more on potato chips than their government spent on energy research and development.

  Even as U.S. public debt skyrocketed, Americans’ personal savings rate dropped from about 12 percent in the early 1980s to 2.5 percent in 2009 (compared with a reported 38 percent in China). The drop occurred steadily and was not merely an artifact of the 2008 financial collapse. Gambling has skyrocketed too, increasing an estimated 6,000 percent between 1962 and 2000. Drug habits that were still countercultural in the Sixties have become practically mainstream. Today, according to recent studies, almost one in five high schoolers drink, use drugs, or smoke during the school day.

  All these ailments are examples of gratifying present wants at the expense of the future. This trend is by no means limited to the poor. Over half the students at America’s private high schools say that drugs are trafficked, kept, or used at their schools. A study in California found drug and alcohol abuse higher among “upscale youth”; adolescents in a suburb where the average family income was over $120,000 reported “higher rates of . . . substance abuse than any other socioeconomic group of young Americans today.”

  Moreover, self-esteem parenting is much more common among wealthier Americans. As the principal of a Silicon Valley prep school put it, “Avoiding discipline is endemic to affluent parents.” Psychologists are observing an explosion of narcissism in America’s children, particularly among the better-off. The so-called millennials—with their sense of entitlement, their expectation of being “CEO tomorrow,” their belief that the workplace should adjust “around our lives instead of us adjusting our lives around work”—are for the most part not lower-income or minority youth. They’re the children of well-off white baby boomers.

  As these children grow up and begin entering the workforce, they are not overwhelming employers with their attitude. “Millennials don’t always want to work,” the consultant Eric Chester told Forbes.com, “and when they do, their terms don’t always line up with those of their employers. All too often, the young worker shows up ten minutes late wearing flip-flops, pajama bottoms, and a T-shirt that says, ‘My inner child is a nasty bastard.’ Then she fidgets through her shift until things slow down enough that she can text her friends or update her Facebook page from her smartphone.”

  And the worst of it is that the demand for instant gratification has spread into our political and economic institutions.r />
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  ALL DEMOCRACIES RUN the risk that politicians will focus on short-term gains, rather than long-term national interests. Politicians who want to get reelected have to satisfy their constituents now; the future is someone else’s problem. In this sense, the real question isn’t why the national debt has grown to its currently unthinkable proportions; it’s what kept it from doing so earlier. Part of the answer has to do with the surrounding culture and whether that culture promotes norms of restraint and responsibility, discipline and investment. In the 1980s and ’90s, American culture was not promoting those norms. The dangers of this development should not be underestimated. For politicians, even war can be a form of instant gratification; the grievous costs are often borne long after those who started it are out of office.

  A false sense of security, no impulse control, and immediate gratification: these forces also played a part in the 2008 financial collapse. Instead of living within their means, average Americans—spurred on by teaser rates and easy credit—bought $500,000 houses with money they didn’t have and loans they couldn’t afford. Instead of following traditional lending practices, banks offered mortgages to almost anyone who walked in the door, collecting fast fees and handing off the risk to someone else. Instead of exercising a disciplining function, credit-rating agencies earned hefty profits by awarding AAA grades to high-risk mortgage-backed securities. Instead of providing long-term sound investments for their clients, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and other investment banks raked in billions by packaging these subprime securities into extremely complex instruments that masked their true risk, without bearing any of the long-term costs; as one financier would later describe these derivatives, “They could explode a day later and you are not impacted one single iota.”

  The collapse of 2008 undoubtedly had multiple causes, including fraud, corruption, ineffective regulation, and old-fashioned greed. But to some extent it was a pure Triple Package implosion. At its heart was a bubble—the housing bubble—and as Shiller and fellow economist Nouriel Roubini have shown, every such “boom and bust” is fueled by a contagious “excessively optimistic” conviction that the boom “will never end” and disastrous risks will never materialize. In other words, rather than being driven by insecurity, people were driven by a false sense of security. And because of this false sense of security, people threw impulse control out the window in pursuit of instant wealth. Those who—like Shiller and Roubini—counseled impulse control and insecurity in the years before the crisis were treated like Cassandras.