Thomas Sowell says this may be the best book of the year

Recently we noted that Jeb Bush was reading "Tiger Mom" Amy Chua's "The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America."

Apparently Chua and co-author and husband Jed Rubenfeld also have a fan in author and conservative economist Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell (Image Source: Hoover Institution video screengrab)

In an article over at Townhall, Sowell notes that Chua and Rubenfeld's book

"may turn out to be the best book of the year...Whether you buy their theory or not, you will be enormously enlightened by their attempts to prove it. In the process they shoot down many of the popular beliefs about upward mobility in America and about the kinds of people who succeed."

"The Triple Package" is premised on the notion that the most successful groups in America reflect the following three traits as Sowell notes: "a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control."

Sowell finds the book enlightening not only because of Chua and Rubenfeld's attempt to explain success, which follow in the footsteps of Thomas Sowell's own "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," along with Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" and "Human Accomplishment," but also because they debunk the idea that upward mobility is dead in America, the studies of which often exclude the very immigrant groups who are rising.

Here's Sowell on the matter:

[instory-book ISBN="9781594205460"]

"Those in the media, in politics and in academia who seem determined to blame American society for individuals and groups who do not rise would be hard-pressed to explain why immigrants of various colors come in at the bottom and proceed to rise, both in the schools and in the economy -- on both sides of the Atlantic.

It would probably never occur to those who are eager to blame "society" that it is they and their welfare state ideology who have, for generations, burdened the underclass with a vision of hopeless victimhood that immigrants have been spared.

By the time various immigrant groups have been here for generations, they have already risen, despite the welfare state ideology that says that they cannot rise.

That so many in the media and in academia who proclaim the end of social mobility in America leave out the fact that data they cite do not include various immigrant groups tells you all you need to know about them.

"The Triple Package" is a book that tells us much that we all need to know about America -- especially if we want to keep the welfare state ideology from destroying the American Dream."