Today we explore how many of the habits and customs we associate with American bourgeois life — religiously reading the Sunday Times, buying organic produce, building your entire identify around excelling at a career you love, etc. — stem from one generation in particular. Friends, we’re talking about the yuppies, that notoriously status-obsessed, hyper-educated cohort of young urban professionals who came to cultural prominence in the ’80s and ’90s, setting off a series of transformations in our cities, media, and consumer culture that we’re still witnessing to this day.
It’s easy to see the Boomer worldview as a reflection of the fact that they had it much easier than us Millennials, economically speaking. But a new book called Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation, by Philadelphia journalist and author Tom McGrath, subtly challenges that idea, reframing the yuppie obsession with money, achievement, and unimpeachable good taste as a response to the rough economic headwinds of the 1970s and ’80s. Along the way, it explores how yuppiedom was equally a reaction to suburban post-war monoculture — and perhaps most perplexingly, a kind of impossible attempt to reconcile a newfound love of capitalism with the egalitarian values of the hippie era.
Tom joins us to discuss the yuppie origin story and the historical factors that rerouted a generation from protesting the Vietnam War to working on Wall Street. We get into who — and what — the yuppies were rebelling against, and how their emphasis on not just consumption, but consuming the right things, laid the blueprint for everything from urban gentrification, to contemporary food culture, to the news and television we consume.
We also talk about whether or not the yuppie still exists — perhaps in the form of Millennials? — and, of course, where Trump, then and now, fits into all of this.
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