Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York
By Dylan Gottlieb
Harvard University Press, 352 pages
Dylan Gottlieb, professor of history at Bentley University, describes Yuppies as “the first social history of financialization.” It lives up to the billing. The book is more than a nostalgia tour through the years of Perrier and disco. It chronicles a social and a moral revolution from which America is still struggling to emerge.
The financial sector went from 4.8 percent of GDP in 1980 to 5.9 percent in 1990. Behind those numbers was a social earthquake. In New York, the number of corporate lawyers doubled between 1978 and 1986. Manufacturing had been the top destination for Harvard MBAs as late as 1975. Wall Street soon overtook it, partly because it paid better, partly because it offered a chance to take part in an attractive urban lifestyle. There were 4 million yuppies in America in 1985, defined as people aged twenty-five to thirty-nine living in cities and earning more than $40,000 ($122,000 today) per year at a professional or managerial job. A market research firm estimated a further 26 million “psychographic yuppies” who saw their wealthier peers as tastemakers.