Two new books have been published recently on the thorny issue of social mobility, one optimistic, suggesting various things parents can do to maximise their children’s chances of success, the other pessimistic, concluding that a child’s fate is more or less sealed at birth. Paradoxically, the optimistic book is incredibly depressing, while the pessimistic one is quite reassuring.
The first book is The Triple Package by the husband and wife team of Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. The authors, who are both law professors at Yale, identify three characteristics that America’s most successful cultural groups have in abundance: a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control.
The message is essentially the same as Chua’s previous book, The Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother, which is that if you want your child to do well you have to duplicate the kind of upbringing Chua had at the hands of her Chinese immigrant parents.
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