Halfway through his bestselling book "Outliers: the Story of Success," Malcolm Gladwell has a chapter titled "Rice Paddies and Math Tests." I haven't read that yet, so I may be mentioning points that he goes on to make later. (Gladwell's chapter title actually sounds the first line of a bad racist joke we've all heard before, the kind of left-handed-compliment that Asian-Americans all over the country have learned, after trial and error, to love and hate.)
Earlier in the book, Gladwell talks about how success is a series of seized opportunities, which isn't really as revolutionary an observation as he makes it seem. (Consider: the flip side of Gladwell's theory is that failure is a series of lost opportunities, which sums it up with encyclopedic precision.)
He mentions how certain people in the US - Bill Gates and Bill Joy, Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan - benefited from being in the right place at the right time. Joy and Gates both got the chance to study programming at an early age because their elite institutions were among the first in the nation to adopt time-share computers, while Carnegie and Morgan benefited from the economic climate in the United States in the late 1800s.
Indian-Americans are a similar case. They are one of the most financially and educationally successful economic groups in the United States, and therefore (by extension) the world. What are the unique circumstances?
Gladwell's formula for success likes to sandwich opportunity between world events ("The perfect age to be in 1975, in other words, is old enough to be a part of the coming revolution but not so old that you missed it." - p. 65)
Having lived in the US and India, it's easy for me to pick out some watershed events that defined the ideal window of opportunity, the one that gave birth to what is possibly the world's most successful ethnic minority (I'm excluding ethnic minorities that profit solely by oppressing and stealing from their neighbors). The standard Indian-American immigrant was obviously brilliant. He/she was a kid with a really sharp mind - the sort of of 1 in a million person you'd pick out of any lineup for combining genius with hard work.
The would-be Indian-American grew up reading American novels and books that he stole from the library, but he struggled with the moral contradictions of Jim Crow. Then MLK, Jr came along, borrowing liberally from that great Indian hero Mahatma Gandhi, and civil rights legislation made the American dream a real possibility for nonwhite people the world over. That was Event One: the abolition of Jim Crow and the enaction of widespread civil rights legislation in the United States. (There was no doubt an economic Event One that I'm currently missing, but without MLK, Brown v or Little Rock, no smart Indian would have applied for an American study visa)
But this student was also old enough that when he began to consider his post-college life - at age 18 - he couldn't foresee that India would, in the period of just a few short years, abolish the license raj and open itself to an unprecedented amount of foreign investment, thus beginning a process that would swiftly turn the world's biggest democracy into a major player in the global economy, and create millions of job opportunities for a new Indian "knowledge elite" - people who became rich just on their smarts. So Event Two: India's economic reforms of 1991. He was long gone by the time they rolled around.
Counting backwards, this means that the ideal would-be Indian-American (a participant in a massive, widespread and totally unintentional social experiment) was born sometime between 1945 and 1955.
He applied to enter the United States and was granted a visa on the basis of merit. American colleges post-MLK had begun to embrace the principles of diversity - even celebrate it. Despite an excellent teaching workforce, rapid economic growth in the US - particularly in knowledge sectors like life sciences and technology - meant that there was greater demand for intelligent workers than there was domestic supply (Event One, Part Two, perhaps) and Indians started getting student visas at a rate never seen before, sto study these subjects.
But what kind of Indians were coming over? Let's remember one thing - in those days, the US had its pick of Indians. Although England was closer (historically, physically) America really was the "land of the free and the home of the brave." This was before globalisation, and before Osama, and before the "Axis of Evil." The world was a very different place.
Excellence in technology and the life sciences requires a particular kind of brain - it does require a high IQ. IQ is 50% genetic. They were also hard-working enough that they won scholarships to study in the US - after all, none of their parents had much money to speak of. These Indians were mostly men, but when it came time for them to marry they had their pick of girls "back home." (And the vast majority married girls from back home.) What sort of girls did they choose? Not trophy wives, like other men in their position might have, because the social construct of "arranged marriage" - and all Indian marriages are arbitrated by family to a degree that Americans would find repugnant - favored quiet, capable women who were fluent in English and had at least some education.
So when we examine Indian-Americans as a class, we have to remember that by and large many of them are part of a group that might as well have been genetically selected (Imagine an island but in order to live there, people have to be smart enough to win a post-graduate scholarship. What sort of place would that be?) It's a shame more sociological experiments haven't been done to capture the effects of success and the expectations of excellence on these children, because people would be curious to know. (This curiosity, I think, is what fueled 'The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' craze) In another two generations, both the inherited intelligence and the hard work ethic that fueled that generation of Indian-Americans will have eroded.
It is an error to believe that the best thing a parent can leave their kids is money. That's not true at all - intelligence and a hard work ethic are infinitely more valuable, and just as easy to squander or to deplete over generations.
Earlier in the book, Gladwell talks about how success is a series of seized opportunities, which isn't really as revolutionary an observation as he makes it seem. (Consider: the flip side of Gladwell's theory is that failure is a series of lost opportunities, which sums it up with encyclopedic precision.)
He mentions how certain people in the US - Bill Gates and Bill Joy, Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan - benefited from being in the right place at the right time. Joy and Gates both got the chance to study programming at an early age because their elite institutions were among the first in the nation to adopt time-share computers, while Carnegie and Morgan benefited from the economic climate in the United States in the late 1800s.
Indian-Americans are a similar case. They are one of the most financially and educationally successful economic groups in the United States, and therefore (by extension) the world. What are the unique circumstances?
Gladwell's formula for success likes to sandwich opportunity between world events ("The perfect age to be in 1975, in other words, is old enough to be a part of the coming revolution but not so old that you missed it." - p. 65)
Having lived in the US and India, it's easy for me to pick out some watershed events that defined the ideal window of opportunity, the one that gave birth to what is possibly the world's most successful ethnic minority (I'm excluding ethnic minorities that profit solely by oppressing and stealing from their neighbors). The standard Indian-American immigrant was obviously brilliant. He/she was a kid with a really sharp mind - the sort of of 1 in a million person you'd pick out of any lineup for combining genius with hard work.
The would-be Indian-American grew up reading American novels and books that he stole from the library, but he struggled with the moral contradictions of Jim Crow. Then MLK, Jr came along, borrowing liberally from that great Indian hero Mahatma Gandhi, and civil rights legislation made the American dream a real possibility for nonwhite people the world over. That was Event One: the abolition of Jim Crow and the enaction of widespread civil rights legislation in the United States. (There was no doubt an economic Event One that I'm currently missing, but without MLK, Brown v or Little Rock, no smart Indian would have applied for an American study visa)
But this student was also old enough that when he began to consider his post-college life - at age 18 - he couldn't foresee that India would, in the period of just a few short years, abolish the license raj and open itself to an unprecedented amount of foreign investment, thus beginning a process that would swiftly turn the world's biggest democracy into a major player in the global economy, and create millions of job opportunities for a new Indian "knowledge elite" - people who became rich just on their smarts. So Event Two: India's economic reforms of 1991. He was long gone by the time they rolled around.
Counting backwards, this means that the ideal would-be Indian-American (a participant in a massive, widespread and totally unintentional social experiment) was born sometime between 1945 and 1955.
He applied to enter the United States and was granted a visa on the basis of merit. American colleges post-MLK had begun to embrace the principles of diversity - even celebrate it. Despite an excellent teaching workforce, rapid economic growth in the US - particularly in knowledge sectors like life sciences and technology - meant that there was greater demand for intelligent workers than there was domestic supply (Event One, Part Two, perhaps) and Indians started getting student visas at a rate never seen before, sto study these subjects.
But what kind of Indians were coming over? Let's remember one thing - in those days, the US had its pick of Indians. Although England was closer (historically, physically) America really was the "land of the free and the home of the brave." This was before globalisation, and before Osama, and before the "Axis of Evil." The world was a very different place.
Excellence in technology and the life sciences requires a particular kind of brain - it does require a high IQ. IQ is 50% genetic. They were also hard-working enough that they won scholarships to study in the US - after all, none of their parents had much money to speak of. These Indians were mostly men, but when it came time for them to marry they had their pick of girls "back home." (And the vast majority married girls from back home.) What sort of girls did they choose? Not trophy wives, like other men in their position might have, because the social construct of "arranged marriage" - and all Indian marriages are arbitrated by family to a degree that Americans would find repugnant - favored quiet, capable women who were fluent in English and had at least some education.
So when we examine Indian-Americans as a class, we have to remember that by and large many of them are part of a group that might as well have been genetically selected (Imagine an island but in order to live there, people have to be smart enough to win a post-graduate scholarship. What sort of place would that be?) It's a shame more sociological experiments haven't been done to capture the effects of success and the expectations of excellence on these children, because people would be curious to know. (This curiosity, I think, is what fueled 'The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' craze) In another two generations, both the inherited intelligence and the hard work ethic that fueled that generation of Indian-Americans will have eroded.
It is an error to believe that the best thing a parent can leave their kids is money. That's not true at all - intelligence and a hard work ethic are infinitely more valuable, and just as easy to squander or to deplete over generations.
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