The twin studies suggest that you can "break" your kids (and damage their outcomes to some degree) if you go too far in most directions, but that as long as you don't do this and you stay fairly moderate, their outcomes depend far more on nature than nurture.

In the case of tiger moms, the confounding factor is that along with their overbearing parenting they probably passed along some highly effective genes, though the kids probably would have been just as effective (maybe even more-so) with a more relaxed upbringing.

That intuitive obviousness is why the contradictory evidence is so surprising!

I would guess that tiger moms probably influence their children's lives much more through heritability of personality attributes (like persistence, ambition, intelligence, etc.) than through their parenting style.

No, the argument in the book is that upbringing matters through ~college graduation but the probability of success (which I think caplan roughly defines as the ability to support an average American family) reverts to genetic probability by 35. Caplan makes a point to say this assumes upbringing in an OECD type of economy.

Been a while since I read it but he covered the obvious counterpoints from what I remember.

Their kids have similar genes. But for better or worse I live in a neighborhood full of tiger moms, and they are not necessarily successful. Also, it takes a certain set of psychological traits to be a tiger mom in the first place, e.g., self discipline and emotional control. I don't think I could have pulled off being a tiger mom, even if I had believed in it and wanted to do it.

Only if tiger moming is actually effective: popular perception of it is probably warped by selection bias.

For every child that was pushed into an Ivy by a ruthless parent, there are probably many others who were left only with an unhappy childhood and a lingering lack of self-esteem.

Plenty of way parents can heavily influence you. I would have turned out much different if my father didn't teach me programming. The current POTUS wouldn't be who he is if he didn't get a small loan of a million dollars.