Tiger Mother is back, this time with her consort in tow. Not content to lecture us about the superiority of Chinese parenting, as she did in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua has returned, with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, to pitch the argument on a collective scale. We are now to learn that it isn’t only family success that depends upon adhering to her creed of joyless drudgery and manic self-inflation, it is also the success of ethnic and religious groups, as well as of the nation as a whole. The argument is “controversial,” of course: Chua knows how to float a bestseller by now. It is also sloppy, shallow, and underinformed, badly misperceiving both America’s historic strength and its current debility.

That argument, which is neither complex nor sophisticated, is easily retold. Successful groups in America—Chua and Rubenfeld instance Jews, Chinese, Indians, Mormons, Lebanese, Iranians, Nigerians, and Cubans (the last two chosen for their membership in larger, largely disadvantaged groups)—share three characteristics. The first is a sense of superiority. Jews believe themselves to be the chosen people, as do Mormons. Iranians and Cubans are apparently notorious, among the nations that surround them in their home countries, for their arrogance and self-importance. And so forth. The second is a sense of insecurity— of anxiety, uncertainty, persecution— resulting either from a group’s prior history or from its experiences subsequent to immigration. The third is impulse control: Mormon abstemiousness, Confucian self-subordination, the strictures of rabbinic law. Put them all together and you have the kind of single-minded drive—the self-belief, the discontent, the grit—that makes for achievement.

Conspicuously absent from their account, as the authors make a point of noting, is the standard explanation of “model minority” success: a historical commitment to education. When minorities prosper, Chua and Rubenfeld claim, it is not because they believe in education per se; it’s because they believe in success, and they realize that education, in the modern world, is the path to success. As for groups that fail to get ahead—and here, of course, the authors venture onto very tricky ground—the problem isn’t inherent inferiority. The problem, for African Americans or Central Appalachians, the two examples they discuss at any length, is that years of bigotry and disadvantage “grind the Triple Package out of” them. Insecurity, yes—but no impulse control anymore, no sense of ethnic destiny.

By the same token, ascendant groups cannot rest on their achievements. In fact, the authors claim, model minorities typically start to go soft by the third generation. Prosperity weakens their resolve. The ideals of equality erode their self- conceit. Their children fall prey to the gospel of self-fulfillment and the lure of instant gratification. In short, America gets to them. What’s even worse, Chua and Rubenfeld conclude, America has gotten to itself. We used to be a “Triple Package culture,” scrappy underdogs on the world stage, but now the only thing that’s left is our sense of superiority, increasingly factitious. Fat and lazy, we need to pull up our collective socks.

Its breathless business-lit prose notwithstanding, The Triple Package is an altogether calmer book than Tiger Mother. There is none of the latter’s demented narcissism. The self-servingness here is only implicit. But that the later volume is the earlier writ large is unmistakable. The best gloss on Tiger Mother is The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller’s classic study of the miseries inflicted by the kind of status- oriented parenting that Chua practices. The “gifted” or accomplished child, Miller says, is one who learns to satisfy her parents’ need for gratification through achievement. But the demand is insatiable, because its satisfaction is always provisional. The child is “never good enough,” so she tries to be perfect. And thus she swings between the poles of grandiosity and depression: the delusion of supremacy and the self-disgust that ensues upon its inevitable collapse. Superiority, inferiority. As for self-control—or rather, self-erasure—the child’s desires are neither validated nor acknowledged, so she simply learns to ignore them.