by Amy Chua
started U.S.-style stock exchanges: See Klaus Weber, Gerald F. Davis, and Michael Lounsbury, “Policy as Myth and Ceremony? The Global Spread of Stock Exchanges, 1980–2005,” Academy of Management Journal 52, no. 6 (2009), pp. 1319, 1320; Kathryn C. Lavelle, The Politics of Equity Finance in Emerging Markets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 19–22.
“hyperpower”: See Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 259–61.
“I cannot think of a single psychological problem”: Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), p. xv.
a bestseller: See Nathaniel Branden, My Years with Ayn Rand (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999), p. 368 (claiming about a million copies sold worldwide).
“virtually every social problem”: Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), pp. 188–9 (italics added) (quoting the chairman of California’s task force on self-esteem).
“[M]any, if not most”: Ibid., p. 189 (quoting sociologist Neil Smelser).
“self-esteem was the most important thing”: Carol S. Dweck, “Mindsets: How Praise Is Harming Youth and What Can Be Done About It,” School Library Media Activities Monthly 24, no. 5 (2008), p. 55.
accomplishment remained central: See William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), vol. 1, pp. 309–11. James observes that a person has to succeed not in everything, but in what’s important to him, in order to sustain his self-esteem: “I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek.” Id. at 310.
severed self-esteem from esteem-worthy conduct: This severance can be seen in the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the standard measure of self-esteem used by psychologists everywhere today. See, e.g., University of Maryland, Department of Sociology, “Rosenberg-Self-Esteem Scale,” www.socy.umd.edu/quick-links/rosenberg-self-esteem-scale (“The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale is perhaps the most widely-used self-esteem measure in social science research”). Created by Morris Rosenberg in 1965, the scale is a question-and-answer survey instrument, entirely attitudinal, asking individuals in a variety of ways how good they feel about themselves. With the arguable exception of asking respondents how strongly they agree with the statement, “I am able to do things as well as most other people,” the Rosenberg test asks no questions about actual conduct, performance, successes, failures, etc.
feel good about themselves: See Lori Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,” Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2011) (questioning “self-esteem” that “comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment”).
much more satisfied with themselves: Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Free Press, 2009), p. 13 (“[s]elf-esteem is at an all-time high in most groups”).
Asian American students: Douglas S. Massey et al., The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 120–1.
world’s leaders in self-esteem . . . among the lower-scoring: See, e.g., Tom Loveless, The 2006 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2006), pp. 13–20.
controlled experiment: See Donelson R. Forsyth, Natalie K. Lawrence, Jeni L. Burnette, and Roy F. Baumeister, “Attempting to Improve the Academic Performance of Struggling College Students by Bolstering Their Self-Esteem: An Intervention That Backfired,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 26 (2007), pp. 447–59; see also Baumeister and Tierney, Willpower, pp. 190–1.
another study: Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 71–3.
“secretly feel bad about themselves”: Lauren Slater, “The Trouble with Self-Esteem,” New York Times, Feb. 3, 2002 (quoting Nicholas Emler).
Serial rapists: Baumeister and Tierney, Willpower, p. 191; see Betsy Hart, It Takes a Parent: How the Culture of Pushover Parenting Is Hurting Our Kids (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), p. 93.
depression and anxiety . . . narcissism: Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.”
“primary task of psychotherapy”: Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem: A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Understanding that Launched a New Era in Modern Psychology (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), p. 251.
“so much red on the page”: Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.”
the self-esteem movement erodes: Baumeister and Tierney, Willpower, pp. 188–97; Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.”
“People with incredibly positive”: David Dent, “Bursting the Self-Esteem Bubble,” Psychology Today, Mar. 1, 2002 (quoting Nicholas Emler); Baumeister and Tierney, Willpower, p. 192.
not taught to endure hardship: See Caitlin Flanagan, “The Ivy Delusion,” The Atlantic, Feb. 24, 2011 (Today’s “good mothers” desperately want their children to discover their “natural talent” and to achieve “effortless success” without experiencing any stress or pain); Elizabeth Kolbert, “Spoiled Rotten,” The New Yorker, July 2, 2012; see also Sally Koslow, Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So Empty Nest (New York: Viking, 2012).
monitor their every move . . . “special”: Madeline Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 29.
anti-inhibition, live-in-the-moment decade: Ron Chepesiuk, Sixties Radicals, Then and Now: Candid Conversations with Those Who Shaped the Era (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1995), p. 29 (quoting Paul Krassner) (“The ultimate credo of the sixties was to live in the present”); Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow, 1993), p. 35 (describing Norman Mailer’s call to “give up ‘the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,’ to live in the moment, to follow the body and not the mind”); Harvey C. Mansfield, “The Legacy of the Late Sixties,” in Stephen Macedo, ed., Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 24.
hardly the first to call attention to immediate gratification: See, e.g., Georgie Anne Geyer, Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), p. 134 (describing polling data showing America shifting between 1950 and 1990 “from future gratification to immediate gratification”); J. Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 10 (“the prevalence of such chronic diseases is also the by-product of a fast-paced culture of instant gratification and individual license”); Michael S. Rothberg, American Greed: A Personal and Professional Look at How Greed Caused the Great Recession of 2008 (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010), p. 112 (“America is an instant gratification society”); Christopher Muther, “Instant Gratification Is Making Us Perpetually Impatient,” Boston Globe, Feb. 2, 2013; Jules Lobel, “America’s Penchant for Instant Gratification,” Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 18, 2003. A “main finding” in a 2011 Pew survey on the future of the Internet was that “[n]egative effects include a need for instant gratification [and] loss of patience.” Pew Research Center, Millennials Will Benefit and Suffer Due to Their Hyperconnected Lives (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 2012), p. 11.
U.S. public debt: See Congressional Budget Office, Federal Debt and Interest Costs (September 1984), p. 2, Table 1; “Federal Debt: Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Economic Research, http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GFDEGDQ188S; Matt Phillips, “The Long Story of U.S. Debt, from 1790 to 2011, in 1 Little Chart,” The Atlantic, Nov. 13, 2012; see also
Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die (London: Allen Lane, 2012), pp. 41–2 (noting that the “statistics commonly cited as government debt” do not “include the often far larger unfunded liabilities of welfare schemes” like “Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security”).
America’s infrastructure: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org.
investment declined . . . even during the . . . 1980s and ’90s: Samuel Sherraden, “The Infrastructure Deficit,” New America Foundation, Feb. 3, 2011, http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_infrastructure_deficit. See also Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy and How to Fix It (New York: Vintage, 2012), p. 45 (“[t]he puzzle is why so little was done during those years” of “continued gains from economic growth”).
research and development spending has dropped by over 50 percent: Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us : How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 229–31.
spending more on potato chips: National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category Five (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2010), pp. 6, 12 n. 13; Friedman and Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us, p. 246.
personal savings rate: “Personal Savings Rate,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Economic Research, http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PSAVERT (charting history of U.S. savings rate); “How Household Savings Stack Up in Asia, the West, and Latin America,” Bloomberg Business Week, June 10, 2010 (reporting 38 percent Chinese household savings rate).
Gambling has skyrocketed too: Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, p. 53; see generally Sam Skolnik, High Stakes: The Rising Cost of America’s Gambling Addiction (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011).
almost one in five high schoolers: National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse XVII: Teens (New York: The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, August 2012), p. 2. See also Adolescent Substance Use: America’s #1 Public Health Problem (New York: The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, June 2011), p. 1.
Over half the students at America’s private high schools: National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse XVII: Teens, p. 3.
study in California: “Study Finds Rich Kids More Likely to Use Drugs Than Poor,” The Partnership for a Drugfree America, Feb. 20, 2007, http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/drugs/study-finds-rich-kids-more; see generally California Healthy Kids Survey, http://chks.wested.org.
adolescents in a suburb where the average family income was over $120,000: Amy Novotner, “The Price of Affluence,” American Psychological Association Monitor on Psychology 40, no. 1 (2009), p. 50 (describing a series of studies conducted by Suniya Luthar with a cohort of suburban adolescents); see, e.g., Suniya S. Luthar and Adam S. Goldstein, “Substance Use and Related Behaviors Among Suburban Late Adolescents: The Importance of Perceived Parent Containment,” Development and Psychopathology 20 (2008), pp. 591–614.
“Avoiding discipline is endemic to affluent parents”: Dan Kindlon, Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age (New York: Hyperion, 2001), p. 15; Gottlieb “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.”
explosion of narcissism: Twenge and Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic, pp. 1–2; Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), pp. 64–9.
millennials . . . “CEO tomorrow”: Ron Alsop, “The ‘Trophy’ Kids Go to Work,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21, 2008.
children of well-off white baby boomers: Eric Hoover, “The Millennial Muddle: How Stereotyping Students Became a Thriving Industry and a Bundle of Contradictions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 11, 2009 (“commentators have tended to slap the Millennial label on white, affluent teenagers”).
“Millennials don’t always want to work”: Dan Schawbel, “Reviving Work Ethic in America,” Forbes.com, Dec. 21, 2011 (quoting Eric Chester).
teaser rates and easy credit: See Robert J. Shiller, The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 6–7; Ben Steverman and David Bogoslaw, “The Financial Crisis Blame Game,” Business Week, Oct. 18, 2008.
bought $500,000 houses with . . . loans they couldn’t afford: Steverman and Bogoslaw, “The Financial Crisis Blame Game”; see also Shiller, The Subprime Solution, p. 45 (2005 survey showed that San Francisco home buyers on average expected a 14% price increase per year and that “a third of the respondents reported truly extravagant expectations – occasionally over 50% a year”).
banks offered mortgages: Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), p. 65 (in the 1990s and 2000s both “ordinary banks” and investment banks “no longer subjected would-be borrowers to careful scrutiny. So-called liar loans became increasingly common, as borrowers fibbed about their income and failed to provide written confirmation of their salar[ies]”); Shiller, The Subprime Solution, p. 6 (“Mortgage originators, who planned to sell off the mortgages to securitizers, stopped worrying about repayment risk”).
AAA grades: Roubini and Mihm, Crisis Economics, pp. 33, 66–7.
“They could explode a day later”: Steverman and Bogoslaw, “The Financial Crisis Blame Game”; see also Roubini and Mihm, Crisis Economics, p. 65 (the problem with these “newfangled” financial products was that “the bank or firm originating the securities had little incentive to conduct the oversight and due diligence necessary”; “a bad mortgage is passed down the line like a hot potato”).
a contagious “excessively optimistic” conviction: See Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, p. 1; Shiller, The Subprime Solution, p. 41 (“social contagion”), pp. 46–7 (“excessively optimistic”), p. 52 (describing mind-set that a catastrophic downturn would simply never happen); Roubini and Mihm, Crisis Economics, p. 18 (“boom will never end”), p. 88 (“blind faith that asset prices would only continue to rise”).
Cassandras: Roubini and Mihm, Crisis Economics, p. 88; Shiller, The Subprime Solution, p. 52.
Tony Blair once called: Jemima Lewis, “The Greatest Nation on Earth? I Don’t Think So,” The Independent, May 12, 2007; “A Blessed Nation?, “The Guardian, May 10, 2007 (asking readers, “What do you make of [Blair’s] description” of Britain as “the greatest nation on Earth”?).
“I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism”: Seema Mehta, “Romney, Obama and God: Who Sees America as More Divine?,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 13, 2012 (quoting Barack Obama and describing reactions to his quote).
“humiliation” . . . “sharp goad”: Orville Schell and John DeLury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 2013), p. 7; see also Suisheng Zhao, “‘We Are Patriots First and Democrats Second’: The Rise of Chinese Nationalism in the 1990s,” in Edward Friedman and Barrett L. McCormick, eds., What If China Doesn’t Democratize? Implications for War and Peace (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), p. 23 (“[T]here is a rallying cry for Chinese everywhere . . . that after a century of humiliation” the time has come for China to “rise in the world to the place it deserves”) (quoting James Lilley, former U.S. ambassador to China and Taiwan).
Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother’s “way of coping”: Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), pp. 11–4.
gave herself painful insulin shots: Ibid., pp. 3–4, 9.
“fragile world” . . . “blessed”: Ibid., p. 11.
“decided to approach on
e of the smartest girls in the class”: Ibid., p. 72; see also pp. 117–8, 143.
“can make an enormous difference”: Ibid., p. 16.
“acting white”: See John H. McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); John McWhorter, “Guilt Trip,” The New Republic, June 24, 2010; John U. Ogbu and Herbert D. Simons, “Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implications for Education,” Anthropology & Educational Quarterly 29, no. 2 (1998), pp. 155, 161. In a 2004 speech, Henry Louis Gates said:
I read the results of a poll from the Washington Post recently that interviewed inner-city black kids, and it said, ‘List things white.’ You know what they said? The three most prevalent answers: getting straight A’s in school, speaking standard English, and visiting the Smithsonian. Had anybody said anything like this when we were growing up, they would have smacked you upside your head and checked you into an insane asylum. Somehow, we have internalized our own oppression.
Henry Louis Gates, “America Beyond the Color Line,” in Catherine Ellis and Stephen Drury Smith, eds., Say It Loud! Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity (New York: The New Press, 2010), p. 235.
phenomenon did not exist at all-black schools: See Roland E. Fryer, “‘Acting White’: The Social Price Paid by the Best and Brightest Minority Students,” Education Next 6, no. 1 (2006).
“Remember that Bill Gates”: Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Rebellion of an Innovation Mom,” CNN World, June 5, 2011, http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/05/rebellion-of-the-innovation-mom.
on entertainment media: Friedman and Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us, p. 128; see also Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2008), chap. 3; Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010).
25 percent more time watching television: See Nancy Zuckerbroad and Melissa Trujillo, “U.S. Schools Weigh Extending Hours, Year,” Associated Press, Feb. 25, 2007 (citing a study finding that the average school day is 6.5 hours and the average school year is 180 days); The Nielsen Co., “TV Viewing Among Kids at an Eight-Year High,” Oct. 26, 2009 (estimating that kids age 6–11 spend 28 hours per week watching TV, which comes to 1,456 hours/year); “Children and Watching TV,” The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology No. 54, December 2011, http://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/Facts_for_Families_Pages/Children_And_Wat_54.aspx (estimating that kids watch 3–4 hours of television each day, which comes to 1,100–1,400 hours per year).