TRIUMPH OF THE YUPPIES: America, the 80s and the creation of an unequal nation, by Tom McGrath
In 1967, bushy-haired Jerry Rubin strolled onto the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange with a few friends and tossed dollar bills into the trading floor. Rubin, co-founder of the activist group Yippies, was delighted when traders piled on top of each other to collect the money.
A decade and a half later, Rubin returned to Wall Street – as a securities analyst. “Politics and rebellion characterized the ’60s,” Rubin wrote in a New York Times opinion piece announcing his surprising new work. “Money and financial interests will capture the passion of the 80s.” Rubin had gone from Yippie co-founder to Yuppie elder statesman.
In his light-hearted story, “The Triumph of the Yuppies,” Tom McGrath sets out to explain the social and cultural transformation embodied by Rubin. What happened in the 1980s? Why did the United States suddenly fall in love with finance as inequality soared? And what do yuppies have to do with it, asks McGrath?
Yuppies—young urban professionals who flocked to cities to renovate old townhouses, eat at interesting restaurants, and make lots of money—were a loaded psychographic from the start. The word appeared in print as early as 1980, in a Chicago magazine article questioning the idea that a yuppie-led “urban renaissance” was underway in cities across the country.
But something was happening. Recent college graduates preferred cities to suburbs. And as the journalists who kept writing articles about them pointed out, yuppies didn’t even pretend they didn’t care about money.
McGrath, former editor-in-chief of Philadelphia magazine, makes this open quest for wealth his central theme by alternating photos of yuppies, the national political scene and major figures from the American business world.
These figures include Jack Welch, the chief executive who transformed General Electric from a heavy industrial company into a financially focused (but ultimately unsustainable) heavyweight, and Michael Milken, the “junk bond king” who surfed for the first time on the wave of financialization of the 1980s to reach extraordinary heights. wealth and then, after pleading guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges, to prison. (President Donald Trump pardoned Milken in 2020.) These profiles are competently sketched, but readers who know the broad strokes won’t learn much.
The yuppie clichés are more fun. In the late 1970s, Richard Thalheimer, a young entrepreneur who sold photocopiers, began offering a sophisticated digital watch to new runners sweating on American sidewalks. The watch sold so well that Thalheimer released an entire catalog of adult toys that no one needed but everyone, or at least all yuppies, wanted.
Within a few years, Sharper Image (the name dated from the days of its photocopiers) was bringing in nearly $100 million a year selling household essentials like a safari hat with a solar fan ($59), a plastic pillow BMW shape ($42) and armor ($2,450).
As products, people and slogans pile up, “Triumph of the Yuppies” can sound, for better or worse, like a lost verse of Billy Joel’s boomer anthem.We didn’t start the fire»:
Häagen-Dazs, Perrier, Cuisinart, MBA/Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose”, Jane Fonda, Running Shoes/Gary Hart, Youngstown, Ivan Boesky, Runoff Work/Wall Street, Turbo Saab, Sharper Image Catalog.
Fortunately, there are a few, like Rubin, the former Yippie provocateur who, in 1983, rented out Studio 54 in the early evenings for professional networking events that he called, in a peak moment, “the business beginnings.”
A few years later, he hit the academic lecture circuit to debate another Yippie co-founder, Abbie Hoffman, who had pranked the New York Stock Exchange alongside Rubin.
Hoffman was looking for a new generation of protesters, but he couldn’t find them. “Where is this generation’s Woodstock Nation?” He asked in front of an audience of students in 1985. “Campuses have become centers of social rest, as exciting as hospital food. »
Rubin rejected any protest. “Why define ourselves as protesters,” he asked, “when we can become people in power?
To gain power, Rubin said, you had to start businesses. And those who started these companies were “the yuppies, the baby boom generation who defied the government in the 1960s” and transformed America from an “industrial country” to “an information country.” .
Hoffman won over the audience, but Rubin was right about the future.
No moment is monolithic. In the 1980s, some students protested investments in apartheid-era South Africa, while others skipped the protests in favor of internships at investment banks. This spring, many students graduating amid a new wave of protests will head straight to Wall Street.
In fact, graduating from an elite university and moving to the city to try to get rich has become so common that we barely notice it. The ultimate triumph of the yuppies is that we don’t even call them yuppies anymore.
TRIUMPH OF THE YUPPIES: America, the 1980s and the Making of an Unequal Nation | By Tom McGrath | Grand Central Editions | 325 pages. | $32
