The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  “No man e’er was glorious”: “Poor Richard for 1734,” in Ford, The Prefaces, p. 38.

  “Be at War with your Vices”: “Poor Richard for 1755,” in Ford, The Prefaces, p. 245.

  “To lengthen thy life”: “Poor Richard for 1733,” in Ford, The Prefaces, p. 28.

  “He that can have patience” . . . “Diligence is the mother of good luck”: “Poor Richard for 1736,” in Ford, The Prefaces, pp. 61, 62.

  antiauthoritarian ferment: See, e.g., Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 21, 23, 46, 79; see generally Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991).

  “loosened the bonds”: Claude S. Fischer, Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 110 (quoting John Adams).

  More wives . . . College students . . . Young couples: Ibid., pp. 111–2.

  A third of the brides: Ibid., p. 113.

  “a country of beginnings”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1903), p. 371.

  Alexander Hamilton: Ashamed of his illegitimate origins, Hamilton “decided to cut himself off from the past and forge a new identity. He would find a home where he would be accepted for what he did, not for who he was.” Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), p. 40.

  “With the past”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838–1842 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1969) p. 241.

  “[T]he earth belongs to the living”: Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (Sept. 6, 1789), in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 15, 27 March 1789 to 30 November 1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 396; Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 18–21.

  unprecedented experiment, which many expected to fail: Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), pp. 139–46; see also Michael J. G. Cain and Keith L. Dougherty, “Suppressing Shays’ Rebellion: Collective Action and Constitutional Design Under the Articles of Confederation,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 11, no. 2 (1999), pp. 233–60 (discussing the “constitutional failures associated with the Articles of Confederation”—especially the “collective action problem”—which were “solved by the new Constitution”).

  full of lawlessness, ineffectual government: Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 367–9; Cain and Dougherty, “Suppressing Shay’s Rebellion,” pp. 233–4.

  close to anarchy: See Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist 15” (1787), in Rakove, The Federalist, p. 65 (“It must in truth be acknowledged that . . . there are material imperfections in our national system, and that something is necessary to be done to rescue us from impending anarchy.”); Richard Sylla, The Rise of Securities Markets: What Can Government Do? (The World Bank: November 1995), pp. 6–7 (describing the disarray when the Articles of Confederation governed).

  But if the majority themselves turned tyrant: See, e.g., James Madison, “Note to His Speech on the Right of Suffrage” (1821), in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Volume III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), pp. 450, 452 (warning of the “danger” to “the rights of property” posed by universal suffrage “whenever the Majority shall be without landed . . . property”); Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, pp. 409–11; Morton J. Horwitz, “Tocqueville and the Tyranny of the Majority,” The Review of Politics 28, no. 3 (1966), p. 293 (“the problem of tyranny of the majority had dominated the political thought of no other nation as it had that of America”); cf. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: MacMillan Co., 1952), pp. 15–18 (speculating that the Constitution’s Framers may have been chiefly concerned with protecting their own property from majoritarian appropriation).

  “passions . . . of the public”: James Madison, “Federalist 49” (1788), in Rakove, The Federalist, pp. 130–3.

  “Constitutions are chains”: John E. Finn, Constitutions in Crisis: Political Violence and the Rule of Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 5 (quoting U.S. Senator John Potter Stockton in debates over the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871); see Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1861 (“A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations . . . is the only true sovereign of a free people”); David J. Brewer, “An Independent Judiciary as the Salvation of the Nation” (1893), reprinted in The Annals of America: Agrarianism and Urbanization 1884–1894 (1968), vol. 11, pp. 423, 428 (“Constitutions . . . are rules proscribed by Philip sober to control Philip drunk”); Thomas M. Cooley, A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1868), pp. 54–5 (Constitution protects against “the danger that the legislature will be influenced by temporary excitements and passions among the people”); Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 5; cf. Akhil Reed Amar, “The Central Meaning of Republican Government: Popular Sovereignty, Majority Rule, and the Denominator Problem,” University of Colorado Law Review 65 (1994), p. 761 (noting the widely held view that “the Bill of Rights was designed to inhibit majority tyranny and limit popular passion” but pointing out that the Constitution was also designed to restrict wayward legislators and presidents).

  structure and restraint: William J. Brennan Jr., “Construing the Constitution,” University of California, Davis Law Review 19, p. 6 (“It is the very purpose of a Constitution—and particularly of the Bill of Rights—to declare certain values transcendent, beyond the reach of temporary political majorities. The majoritarian process cannot be expected to rectify claims of minority right that arise as a response to the outcomes of that very majoritarian process”); Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, p. 453.

  powerful national government: Wood, The American Revolution, p. 151 (noting that the Constitution created an “extraordinarily powerful national government” that “possessed far more than the additional congressional powers that were required to solve the United States’ difficulties in credit, commerce, and foreign affairs”); Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, p. 467; see generally Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005).

  tyranny: See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 233 (describing Jefferson’s view).

  “a more perfect Union”: United States Constitution, preamble.

  A great many Americans believed: See Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993), p. 549 (“For over 80% of U.S. history, its laws declared most of the world’s population to be ineligible for American citizenship solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender. . . . [At the time of the Founding,] [m]en were thought naturally suited to rule over women. . . . White northern Europeans were thought superior culturally—and probably biologically—to black Africans, bronze Native Americans, and indeed all other races and civilizations. Many British Americans also treated religions as an inherited condition and regarded Protestants as created by God to be morally and politically, as well as theologically, superior to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and others”); Thurgood Marshall, “Reflections on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution,” Harvard Law Review 101 (1987), pp. 1–5; Ellen Carol DuBois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878,” The Journal of American History 74 (1987), pp. 836–62.

  stains on American history: S
ee, e.g., Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1994) (discussing discrimination and racial violence that has persisted over the past century and a half, afflicting blacks as well as Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans); Robert A. Williams Jr., Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) (criticizing the racist roots of federal Indian law); Jose Monsivais, “A Glimmer of Hope: A Proposal to Keep the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 Intact,” American Indian Law Review 22 (1997), p. 2 (“When Andrew Jackson became President of the United States in 1829, the policy of removal began. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was enacted to relocate most of the eastern tribes west of the Mississippi river. . . . Vast numbers of American Indians were marched westward onto lands considered unfit for human life”); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); William D. Carrigan, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 2 (2003), pp. 411–38.

  “History is more or less bunk”: Charles N. Wheeler, “Fight to Disarm His Life’s Work, Henry Ford Vows,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916, p. 10.

  “disintegration of the work ethic”: Robert Rector and Jennifer A. Marshall, “The Unfinished Work of Welfare Reform,” National Affairs (Winter 2013).

  “There is still today a frontier”: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Radio Address on the Third Anniversary of the Social Security Act,” August 15, 1938, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15523.

  “Second Bill of Rights” . . . “inadequate”: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16518.

  “freedom from insecurity”: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Greeting to the Economics Club of New York,” Dec. 2, 1940, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15907; see also David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 247. The term “social security” is believed to have been coined by the economist Abraham Epstein, who in 1933 wrote, “Ever since Adam and Eve . . . insecurity has been the bane of mankind.” Abraham Epstein, Insecurity: A Challenge to America (New York: H. Smith & R. Haas, 1933), p. 1.

  chances of graduating: Greg Toppo, “Big-City Schools Struggle with Graduation Rates,” USA Today, June 20, 2006.

  $130,000 a year selling drugs: Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, “An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (August 2000), pp. 755, 770.

  at the average age of twenty: See Leon Bing, Do or Die (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 268 (estimating the life expectancy of active gang members in South Central Los Angeles at nineteen years); William J. Harness, Chief of Police, Gang Facts and Myths: A Guide for School Administrators (Conroe ISD Police Department, 1994–2006), p. 21 (stating that the average life expectancy of an active gang member is 20 years, 5 months).

  everything that’s important about the big picture: See, e.g., William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 52–3 (“Neighborboods that offer few legitimate employment opportunities, inadequate job information networks, and poor schools lead to the disappearance of work . . . many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy . . . . These circumstances also increase the likelihood that the residents will rely on illegitimate sources of income”), p. 107 (Where “young people have little reason to believe that they have a promising future,” there tends to be “an explosion of single-parent families”); see also Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-War Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Anchor, 1991).

  apply at McDonald’s: See Paul Krugman, End This Depression Now! (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), p. 7; see also Levitt and Venkatesh, “An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances,” p. 771 (noting that gang members often also hold low-paying jobs in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants).

  wiped out all the sectors: See, e.g., Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, p. 6; Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 243, 264–9; Christopher Price, “The Impact of the Mechanization of the Coal Mining Industry on the Population and Economy of Twentieth Century West Virginia,” West Virginia Historical Society Quarterly 22, no. 3 (2008), pp. 2–3.

  rise in American income and standards of living: Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout, Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), pp. 139–40 (stating that “Americans easily quadrupled their real earnings” over the course of the twentieth century); U.S. Congress, “The U.S. Economy at the Beginning and End of the 20th Century,” usinfo.org/enus/economy/overview/docs/century.pdf (“Today, the average full-time employee works about 40 hours per week rather than 60, and the average family spends just 15 percent of its income on food today, compared to 44 percent in 1900”); Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 31 (emphasizing U.S. policies that widened availability of credit to ordinary Americans starting in the early 1980s).

  greatest wealth explosions: See, e.g., Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 18–9; John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (New York: HarperPerennial, 2004), pp. 416–8; Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), p. 30 (quoting venture capitalist John Doerr as describing Silicon Valley in the 1990s as “the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet”).

  entire decade came to be symbolized: Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1987); see Jessica Winter, “Greed Is Bad. Bad!” Slate.com, Sept. 25, 2007, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/dvdextras/2007/09/greed_is_bad_bad.html.

  1990s were astronomically even richer: For graphs dramatically illustrating the record highs in stock prices, corporate earnings, and home prices, see Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (2d ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 3–6, 13; see also Bill Hutchinson, “He Brakes for Cash: Day-Trader Cabbie Winning Wall St. Game,” New York Daily News, Aug. 19, 1999, p. 3.

  multimillionaires overnight: Eryn Brown, “Valley of the Dollars: The Young, Wealthy Netheads of San Francisco and Silicon Valley Protest That It’s Not About the Money. Give Us a Break,” CNN.com, Sept. 27, 1999, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/09/27/266205; Ilana DeBare, “Young, Rich, Now What?: Tech Millionaires Face the Rest of Their Lives,” S.F. Chronicle, June 4, 1999, http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Young-Rich-Now-What-Tech-millionaires-face-2927263.php; Eryn Brown, “So Rich, So Young, but Are They Really Happy?,” CNNMoney.com, Sept. 18, 2000, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/09/18/287692.

  stock market tripled: Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, p. 13.

  sixty-four new millionaires per day: Rusty Dornin, “New Anxieties Can Accompany Silicon Valley’s New Money,” CNN.com, Feb. 26, 2000, http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/02/26/sudden.wealth.syndrome.

  Corporate compensation soared: Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
, Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), pp. 68–9; Krugman, End This Depression Now!, p. 78.

  few complained: Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, p. 3 (chart showing soaring stock prices in the 1990s), p. 213.

  family net worth climbed: Felix Salmon, “Chart of the Day: Median Net Worth, 1962–2010,” Reuters, June 12, 2012, http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/06/12/chart-of-the-day-median-net-worth-1962-2010.

  the top 1 percent of U.S. earners: Congressional Budget Office, Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007 (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, 2011), pp. ix–xi.

  vast majority of Americans: Ibid., p. ix (reporting an approximate 65 percent income gain for Americans in the top quintile from 1979 to 2007 and 40 percent gain for those in the second through fourth quintiles). For other estimates of historical American income growth broken down by quintile, see U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables: Households, Table H-3: Mean Household Income Received by Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent (All Races), www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/income/data/historical/household; but cf. Russell Sage Foundation, “Chartbook of Social Inequality,” www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/chartbook/Income %20and%20 Earnings.pdf.

  As economist Robert Shiller observes: Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, p. 213.

  globalization seemed to herald: See Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 233.

  law students at Georgetown: Brooke Masters, “GU Legal Eagles Flying to Estonia’s Aid,” Washington Post, June 18, 1992.

  “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” . . . “final form”: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992), p. xi.