Triumph of the Yuppies

Starred review from March 25, 2024
Vaulting ambition, passionate consumerism, and a business culture that threw workers under the bus are among the achievements of the yuppie generation, according to this penetrating study. Journalist McGrath (MTV) charts the trajectory of the “young urban professional” cohort who protested in the 1960s, “found themselves” in the ’70s, and went to Wall Street in the ’80s. Their impact, he notes, was far-reaching: they gentrified America’s cities with chic restaurants and shops, driving up rents; fetishized luxury brands and artisanal foods like Cuisinart, BMW, and Perrier; forged a self-congratulatory concept of success by flaunting their advanced degrees and endless work hours; and embraced Ronald Reagan’s vision of unfettered corporate capitalism. McGrath hangs his analysis around portraits of colorful personalities like Jerry Rubin, a former lefty radical who started a company that hosted business-networking parties, and barbed accounts of the yuppies’ oft-satirized quirks, from their dreary jargon to their reflexive crassness (“I’ve got a fast-track career.... And now I need a faster-track relationship,” he quotes one saying as he dumped his wife for a coworker). He also reckons the cost of the yuppie-administered 1980s economy with haunting profiles of rust belt towns like Youngstown, Ohio, that lost millions of manufacturing jobs. It’s a beguiling look at an era that inaugurated an ever-widening rift between a self-satisfied elite and a resentful working class.

April 1, 2024
A cultural history of Yuppies, the elite young urban professionals of the 1980s. McGrath, the former editor-in-chief of Philadelphia magazine and author of MTV: The Making of a Revolution, explores the rise of a highly educated subgroup of the baby boomer generation that became known as the Yuppies. The election of 1980 was pivotal for many reasons. "In rejecting Teddy Kennedy and Jimmy Carter and electing Ronald Reagan as president," writes the author, "American voters had sent a clear message: The status quo wasn't acceptable." Over the course of the decade, as McGrath engagingly details, the Yuppies continued to make choices that significantly influenced American society, choices that still resonate today. "What Yuppies did, ate, bought, thought, and aspired to impacted everyone," he writes. "Yuppies mattered." McGrath cogently explains the economic and political environment that America was facing during this time and the actions this group took in an attempt to set themselves apart from previous generations, as well as the ironies involved in many of their decisions. The author also explores specific trends that arose during this time, including the transformations that took place in neighborhoods of large cities across the country, including New York City's SoHo, Chelsea, and Upper West Side; Boston's Back Bay and South End; and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. Although the 1980s is remembered as the decade of excess, as McGrath notes, "in truth, many, if not most, Boomers were struggling." The author examines how those without college degrees were affected by the political and economic decisions of the time, with particular focus on the widening cultural divide that arose and contributes to the "unequal and unsettled America we live in today." From Dallas to Dynasty, Jane Fonda to Madonna, readers who witnessed the rise and fall of the Yuppies will appreciate this trip down memory lane. Insightful and immensely entertaining.

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