A rift in the MAGA coalition emerged last week as Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—co-chairs of DOGE, a Trump advisory committee—advocated for more H-1B visas, angering immigration hard-liners in the GOP base. Generally, the debate over H-1B is an economic one. But in his defense of the program, Ramaswamy turned the conversation to culture, arguing that tech companies prefer to hire foreigners—and their offspring—because the children of native-born Americans don’t work hard enough.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” he wrote on X. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
What America needs, according to Ramaswamy, is “more movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of ‘Friends.’ More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’ Most normal American parents look skeptically at ‘those kinds of parents.’ More normal American kids view such ‘those kinds of kids’ with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.”
This is clearly a personal essay about Ramaswamy’s high-school unpopularity masquerading as a political manifesto but never mind that. What we need, apparently, is a country of “those parents”—Tiger moms—the sort of parents who see childhood as an 18-year-long college application process, better spent doing extra homework and practicing the violin than playing football or making friends.
Leave aside for a moment the insult Ramaswamy hurls at sleepovers, a proud tradition which my colleague Suzy Weiss defended here. His entire argument is a terrible proposition. Children raised to be good little robots might grow up to build robots of their own someday, and become rich. Asians are the highest-earning racial group in America, but are they happier for it? Suicide is the leading cause of death for Asians aged 15-24—something that isn’t true for any other group—and the second-leading cause of death for those aged 25-34. Writing for Psychology Today, therapist John Kim says Tiger parenting produces anxiety and depression, as parents use disapproval as a perverse “love language.” Twenty percent of Americans already have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. Do we really want this country to be even more stressed-out?
Furthermore, a culture that values getting a degree from an Ivy League establishment is not conducive to the sort of risk required to create anything unique. Many of America’s greatest creative geniuses never even graduated from college. The daughter of an illiterate sharecropper, Dolly Parton became one of the most prolific and best-selling singer-songwriters of all time. Cormac McCarthy dropped out of the University of Tennessee to join the Air Force. Bored at an Alaska military base, he began to read voraciously and later became one of America’s most celebrated novelists. A high school dropout, Quentin Tarantino worked a series of odd jobs—porno theater usher, video store clerk, aerospace industry recruiter—before becoming one of Hollywood’s most prominent filmmakers. To a certain extent, this principle even applies to business. While Asian immigrants and their children often work in tech, tiger parents are frequently unsupportive when their children take a risk and start companies of their own, as some Asian founders have complained.
Steve Jobs only went to college for a semester before dropping out. He was hardworking, to be sure, but he was also a hippie, the sort of person who did LSD and ate free food at a Hare Krishna temple. His appreciation for Zen Buddhism informed Apple’s minimalist design policy—an aesthetic crucial to the company’s success. Plenty of other famous tech entrepreneurs, including Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, also dropped out of college—a place that, like Tiger mom culture, fosters competitiveness, but stifles other qualities like creativity and risk-taking. Case in point: Unlike many of his peers, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel actually graduated from college, but now runs a fellowship that pays young people $100,000 to skip higher education and build companies instead. “In education, your value depends on other people failing,” he said in 2011, calling education a “bubble.”
Would the economy grow if every parent became a “tiger mom”? Probably, but what’s the point of 0.5 percent GDP growth (or whatever) if the consequence is living in a society of automaton-like strivers gripped by anxiety? Some immigrants may feel compelled to live a life of endless hustle, but there’s no point in living in a prosperous country if you can’t enjoy it. Not everyone in this country needs to be a mathlete who spent his childhood studying for the SATs: We need normal people who fix cars, bathe the elderly, or pave the roads, and then go home and watch football—hardworking Americans who keep the country running and don’t care about getting into Yale. What America needs is a country of citizens, not competitors.
