Dylan Gottlieb, How Yuppies Changed America, NYTimes, May 4, 2026.
So much of what we take for granted today — from our meritocratic rat race to our gentrified neighborhoods to our culture of overwork, fitness training and foodie obsession — was born in the yuppie-made 1980s. In that moment, they fashioned a bargain that we are still living with: An increasingly diverse professional class signed up for a life of hard-won affluence, at the cost of deep inequality for everyone else.
Yuppies were called into being by the forces that were remaking the economy in the 1980s. After the Carter and Reagan administrations loosened the regulations governing Wall Street, finance began to generate a greater share of profits than manufacturing or services. Investment banks and law firms now shaped the fates of the corporations they had once served. As America hitched its fortunes to finance, those banks and firms began to chop up, spin off, merge, offshore or otherwise squeeze short-term value out of the nation’s legacy corporations. But to do it, they needed legions of employees to handle the grunt work: the proofreading, drafting and document review that kept the takeover machinery in motion.
o find those employees, recruiters flooded the campuses of America’s elite universities. In 1976, less than 5 percent of surveyed seniors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School were headed to Wall Street for investment banking. By 1987, it was one in three. At Yale, 40 percent of the entire graduating class of 1986 applied to work at the investment bank First Boston.
High-level grunt work:
Once they were hired, aspiring yuppies were expected to work more hours, often on smaller and less intellectually demanding piecework. They were also given less meaningful training, all for narrower chances of promotion to partner. As the professional world was beginning to diversify, it became an increasingly miserable place to work. This was no accident: The legal and financial bosses who were commanding these diverse armies of young professionals sought to extract maximum value out of their labor.
This early wave of yuppies contains the origins of our present-day meritocratic competition, which turned college admissions into something akin to “The Hunger Games.”
Grunt work all the time in everything:
On the job, newly minted yuppies were also sold a particular story: Upward mobility was open to anyone with the right degree and the right work ethic. [...]
That dogged pursuit of the strenuous life extended from the workplace into yuppies’ leisure time. They developed a passion for road races like the New York City Marathon. This wasn’t the casual jogging that countercultural types had embraced in the late 1960s. It was distance running, and it required the same self-control and long-range planning that characterized yuppie careers. [...
The yuppies also helped forge our modern foodie culture: one that required wealth but also the cosmopolitanism to know that, say, balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes and Manchego cheese were foods worth savoring.]
They consumed the Democratic Party:
Yuppies also redrew our political map. They helped to shift the Democratic Party away from the unions, Black Americans and urban bosses of the New Deal coalition and toward the interests of metropolitan professionals. During the 1980s, a new generation of politicians and donors — people like Gary Hart, Chuck Schumer and Bruce Wasserstein — remade liberalism for the postindustrial era. The meritocratic ethos of the trading floor, they reasoned, should govern society at large. Innovation, not regulation or redistribution, would drive growth. And the sclerotic regulatory state was only hampering it. What was needed instead was a nimbler government that oversaw a technology-heavy economy, with yuppies at the vanguard.
Hello inequality my old friend:
The rise of the yuppie was not without its costs. The upper echelons of our society became more inclusive in terms of race, ethnicity and gender — but only for those who ran a gantlet of educational and professional challenges on their way to the top. By admitting women and members of racial minorities, the new yuppie elite helped obscure the skyrocketing economic inequality that would soon become a central fact of American life. Since the 1980s, upwardly mobile yuppies have left blue-collar, pink-collar and less-educated service workers further and further behind.
Resentment sets in:
After decades sitting atop this brutal hierarchy, yuppies and their arrogance bred new resentments. In the 2010s, a brand of populist conservatism opposed nearly every tenet of the yuppie dream, from racial and gender diversity to educational meritocracy to frictionless finance and globalization to gourmet culture and the very idea of urban living itself.
This response was unsurprising given the real harm done by Wall Street firms to blue-collar America. But the wounds were as much psychic as they were economic. Racial grievance gave the movement its power. So did geographic and class-based resentment of the cosmopolitan elite that yuppies embodied. After all, locally rich but less educated white people — owners of car dealerships and construction companies across the South and Midwest — were among the fiercest populist conservatives.
And this set the stage for Donald Trump.
Today, the class of people once known as yuppies are both everywhere and under threat. The Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion and affirmative action might damage the recruiting pipeline that has conveyed women and members of racial minorities into the professions. Employers will have to rely on more informal and more discriminatory forms of hiring: personal connections, nepotism and cultural “fit,” all of which tend to favor the privileged. Our professional class may shrink, welcoming only the sons and daughters of the already rich. [...]
What’s more, the rollout of A.I. threatens to decimate entry-level professionals [...] Even a moderately secure upper-middle-class lifestyle might soon be out of reach.
The upshot:
Yuppies were the first class of young people to be drawn into the sweatshop of the meritocracy. Now is the time to rethink the bargain they made, which offered diversification and affluence at the cost of exploitation and broader inequality. If history teaches anything, it is that if a class can be made, it can also be unmade.
There's more at the link.
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