We are in a world the yuppie made: It’s about chasing money and status

Given how the US model has rippled across much of the world, Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation by Tom McGrath tells a familiar story. It explores the social and economic factors that produced the yuppie, and how this class impacted politics, business, culture and cities.

If the 1960s were about idealism and the 70s about a search for the self, the 80s were all about money and status. Newsweek declared 1984 the Year of the Yuppie. Capitalism was being unshackled under Reagan. Wall Street reinvented itself. Young professionals moved back into cities, displacing the poor. The hot new jobs were in law, finance, media and business. Meanwhile, the bottom 80% experienced a drop in their income.

After decades of prosperity in US, this generation was the first to experience economic anxiety. Their keen focus on achievement and career success was echoed all around. The message was, start competing. Of course many were also getting hurt by Reagan’s supply-side economics. The steel and auto industry were collapsing, there were farm foreclosures and factory shutdowns, unemployment rate was over 30%. The message from the White House cast misfortune as a personal failure.

The brightest graduates became financial analysts. Meanwhile, following Jack Welch at GE, companies stopped investing in workers and communities, and the idea of loyalty to one company became passe, even as shareholder value multiplied. Manufacturing was being offshored, all the job growth was in low-wage services.

For yuppies, the drive was about optimising your life: excelling, being your best, and experiencing the best. ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it’ was the mantra, rather than ‘make the world a better place’. Feel-good fervour was everywhere. Fitness suddenly became an obsession, from Nautilus machines to Jane Fonda’s workouts, aerobics and running. As yuppies jogged to work during a transit strike, sneakers became a status symbol, to show membership in this ‘fast track’ class.

Weekend and lifestyle sections sprang up in media, to teach people about food, fashion and art. Perrier, Cuisinart, Haagen-Dazs…catered to aspirations, as did expensive toys for boys (adult men). Brands became big, not because of craftsmanship or quality alone, but because they were about owning something others didn’t.
This success ethic produced an arms race of luxury. Lifestyles of the rich and famous became public obsessions. TV shows like Dallas and Dynasty, about rich people behaving badly, were widely watched, around the world.

Meanwhile, then-young New York property developer Donald Trump promised gold-plated monuments to glamour that ‘only the rich can afford’. Former counterculture types, like Steve Jobs and Mitch Kapor, became savvy businesspersons and tech entrepreneurs.

The Black Monday of Oct 19, 1987, when the stock market crashed, was dubbed the end of the yuppie era. But the ethos had taken deep root. Centrist politicians like Bill Clinton embodied it. Meanwhile, the rest of America expressed its antipathy by declaring yuppies ‘elites’, rather than the super-rich.

By 2016, the percentage of wealth owned by middle class had dropped to 17%. The rich owned 79% of America, up from 60% in the 1980s. Amid this yawning wealth and income gap, Trump persuaded working-class people he was on their side. The world that made the yuppie, and the world the yuppie made, is still our defining reality.