2008: The summer has been long, and Linda and I have been quarrelling for longer. I still haven't finished the second novel I haven't started and we are taking our three children, Vanja, Heidi and John, to a rundown theme park.

"This is boring," Linda says.

"Really boring," I reply.

"Do you want a sandwich?"

"Only if it's stale."

We switched tenses and went home. I tried to write, but Linda wanted me to make dinner. I could have told her to do it herself, but I preferred the sullen silence of martyrdom. I put the children to sleep by reading extracts of Dostoyevsky and Holderlin. If they were going to bore me, I was going to bore them. I then sat down and thought of the first and only time I had been happy.

Somewhere down the line, Linda got pregnant again. Heidi's birth was even duller than Vanja's. I can barely bring myself to mention John's.

"Where have we gone wrong?" Linda cried. "We used to be in love. Now I'm the world's worst parent."

"That's typical," I replied. "It's always got to be about you. I'm the world's worst parent. Now stop moaning while I fly to Norway to give a lecture to seven people about my two shitty novels."

As I landed in Oslo, my phone rang. My mother had had a serious heart attack. I smiled. Maybe now I'd have something to write about in my next book.

It is one of humanity's enduring mysteries why some individuals, such as ourselves, rise from unpromising origins to such dizzy heights when so many others, like you, are failures. This book aims to answer that question for the first time – by drawing on bits of research that happen to fit our thesis, emails sent to our daughter and Google searches.

So why do some groups outperform each other in America? What has made us both brilliant lawyers, bestselling authors (and one of us a devastatingly attractive Tiger Mother), while you struggle along on welfare benefits? One simple answer is that we are both shameless, publicity-hungry individuals who pretend to court controversy, while you are gullible, reactive losers. But that is not an area we intend to explore too deeply.

What links the Mormons, the Jews, Cuban Americans, Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Nigerian Americans and Scientologists? They are all more likely to be high-status individuals. It is our contention that all these groups share the Triple Package – a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control – that allows them to be enormously successful.

At this point, we would like to make it clear that we entirely dissociate ourselves from any racial or eugenic subtext. We firmly believe that many unsuccessful groups or cultures may or may not have superiority complexes, may or may not be insecure and exercise impulse control – and even if they do or don't, the absence of these qualities in no way reflects adversely on them. And if the effect of this is that our book turns out to be just a series of generalisations, rather than a theory with predictive qualities, then so be it.

As we don't have much to say beyond superiority, insecurity and impulse control, it is necessary to keep repeating them. First, the superiority complex. There is no need for the superiority complex to be based on any concrete data. While it is obvious that the Jews and the Chinese have much to be superior about, it's self-evident that many parts of Nigeria and Cuba are complete dumps. What matters is that a culture should be arrogant enough to believe it is superior to all others.

Obviously, we would in no way wish to suggest that those groups who fail to exercise basic self-control are in any way primitive or inferior. Some groups have had enormous difficulties that have proved insurmountable. Though it might help if some people – no names! – got off their fat butts, did some work and stopped pigging out on supersized McDonald's meals. Only saying.

There is an underside to the Triple Package. Material success does not always make you happy. So if you are content to be poor and jobless, like the people of Appalachia, we wish you all the best. Personally, we quite like our five-bedroomed Manhattan apartment. There are also signs America may be changing. It's becoming clear the Jews are becoming complacent, as they are no longer imposing a huge sense of guilt on their children. Decades of therapy is undermining their sense of angst and insecurity. Carry on like this and they will end up losers, like some other groups we are too polite to mention. Don't say you haven't been warned, Jed.