Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation

by Tom McGrath

In Triumph of the Yuppies, Tom McGrath presents the first-ever book-length history of the Yuppie phenomenon, chronicling the roots, rise, triumph and (seeming) fall of the “young urban professionals” who radically altered American life between 1980 and 1987.

By the time their obituary was being written in the late 1980s, Yuppies—the elite, uber‑educated faction of the Baby Boom generation—had become something of a cultural punchline. This was a species that regularly drank white wine spritzers deserved to be mocked. But amidst the Yuppies's preoccupation with money, work, and career success; their colonization of previously working‑class neighborhoods in various American cities; their self‑evident self‑absorption; and their obsession with having just the right status‑signifying stuff, from BMWs and VCRs to American Express cards and Cuisinarts, there was something serious happening, too, something that continues to have profound ramifications on American culture four decades later.

Based on new interviews with people at the center of the action in the '80s, this book brings to life the ascendance of this Yuppie elite. It chronicles educated Boomers' transformation from idealists in the late 1960s to careerists in the early 1980s, and charts how marketers, the media, and politicians pivoted to appeal to this influential new group. And it shows how Yuppie values impacted the broader culture—from gentrification in cities and an obsession with money and career success to an indulgent materialism. Most significantly, it shows how the me‑first mindset typical of Yuppieness helped created the largest income inequality in a century.

Brimming with lively and nostalgic details (think Jane Fonda, The Sharper Image, and laughable tidbits of Yuppie culture), Triumph of the Yuppies is a portrait of America just as it was beginning to come apart—and the origin story of the America we live in today. 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Economics, Business, Audiobook

336 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2024

Reviews

[Roy Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always had this nagging feeling that I live in the dust of some great thing which has very recently become unserviceable. We all live with creeping unease about "the state of things". There is an increasingly visible difference between the way painted faces on our screens talk about America and the way it actually is. No longer maintained is the veneer which conceals a rotting imperial corpse slowly eating itself.
This book documents the activities of boomers after they finish college. Referred to as yuppies, short for young urban professionals. As a group they psychotically decide to strip the copper out of America's walls because they want money instead of a functional society. Half a century later they all live in mcmansions and their legacy is to have turned America into a strip mall parking lot.
Netgalley provided this book

[Michelle Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was fascinating to read about an era that I lived through as a young adult and to discover how much of what I thought was normal Americanism was actually a unique economic movement. I can recall noticing a huge interest in European travel in my young twenties and that it seemed to coincide with the introduction in the US to European goods and things like lattes and cappuccinos and specialty, gourmet foods (my parents never had those things).

I didn’t realize at the time that I was becoming label conscious because the culture around me was becoming that way. I certainly wasn’t raised with that kind of mindset or exposure to nicer things. Reading this book opened my eyes to the influences of materialism and how it started to overtake our culture. Not only were the young urban professionals aspiring to owning expensive things, those desires filtered down to people who couldn’t afford such luxuries. So people started going into debt in order to own expensive things and families that used to manage on one income and live within their means started to “need” two incomes to keep up with the cost of acquiring more and better stuff.

Apparently, Ronald Reagan was at least partly responsible for the rising wealth of the upper class because of his tax cuts for the rich. As a giant Ronald Reagan fan, is hard to learn that he may not have done everything exactly right. According to McGrath, Reagan’s “trickle down” economic theory didn’t pan out as promised. Instead of the money “trickling down” from the wealthy peoples’ tax cuts to benefit the less wealthy, the rich got richer and the middle class started to diminish.

This happened partly because high paying labor union jobs started to move oversees where there was/is cheaper labor. Whole towns were decimated by this as factories closed their doors to American workers. I’m not sure that all of that was Reagan‘s fault, but it did seem to happen during that period of time. The result, according to the author, is that we now live in an increasingly materialistic culture and there is a vast divide between the wealthy and the working class. The middle class has become much smaller as well.

Because every book addresses issues through a biased lens, I take some of the author’s conclusions with the grain of salt, but some of it makes sense to me and is causing me to rethink some of my long-held opinions about the Reagan era.

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 ⭐️

kinda crazy that we're living in the 1980s rn lol

**thank you to grand central pub for the gifted copy**

[Susan Scribner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very readable account of how the idealistic 1960s and cynical 1970s gave rise to the Yuppie (Young Urban Professional) phenomenon of the early 1980s. This was the first time since the end of WWII that the promise of the American Century was realized only by white, college-educated Baby Boomers. These Yuppies flocked to New York and other big cities, worked in the rapidly evolving finance industry, and generally lived by the mantra, "whoever dies with most toys, wins." No, Millennials didn't event foodie-ism (they just turned it into an app) or trendy workout spas; the Yuppies got there first. Jerry Rubin, former 60s radical activist, actually became a stockbroker, claiming that entrepreneurship-focused capitalism was the best way to empower people and bring about change.

McGrath views the era with nostalgic humor (Jane Fonda workout videos! "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?" The Sharper Image catalog!), but also describes with chilling accuracy how the Reagan presidency and the prioritization of corporate stock prices led to extreme inequality, especially in communities that formerly relied on manufacturing jobs. You can draw a line straight from the Yuppie phenomenon to the election of Donald Trump. Suddenly those "how many Yuppies does it take to change a lightbulb?" jokes* aren't so funny anymore, are they?

*Two: one to fix the martinis and one to call the electrician

[Umar Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book helps explain the shifts in American cities, the dominant culture, and the beginnings of the growth of inequality. There will be a sequel to this book in twenty-five years when our young campus activists fully embrace their positions in life and drop the idealism.

Just a note: as Tom McGrath repeatedly points out- yuppies were a small minority of the Baby Boomer generation. It was their wealth and prominence in places like NYC and LA that amplified the trend via media and artistic depictions. A bigger story of this time is of those working-class families who lost ground and communities that were decimated. There weren't many New York Times and Atlantic writers among the laid-off auto and steel workers to tell these stories. This hasn't changed, unfortunately. As an example, the average New Yorker is a working-class first - or second-generation immigrant who tends to be religiously observant. Media and artistic coverage would lead you to believe the city to be entirely populated by affluent white American yuppies and younger secular oriented transplant hipsters. Again, who gets to tell the story? Those in a position benefitting from the present economic conditions.

Also... did Jerry Rubin have the idea for LinkedIn and Facebook (minus the tech)?

[Caitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a good introduction to explaining how wealth disparity began to ramp up to what it is today in late stage capitalist U.S. It covers the outsourcing of jobs, trickle down economics, gentrification of city neighborhoods and hyperconsumerism at a time when those elements were glorified as the cure to a straggling U.S. economy.

[Shoshanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, really good. I was always curious about how and why the culture changed so much from the sixties and seventies to the eighties. It was super fascinating learning how so much of the culture followed the life stages and desires of the baby boom generation. I sadly learned how much of current city culture, and honestly a lot of the culture that I thought of as progressive, was influenced by the yuppies. Even in Ann Arbor and Ypsi, I'm seeing the cultural history tinged by this lens. Highly recommended!

[Allyson Copeland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I just read Corporate America’s villain origin story.

[Michaela Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley, Tom McGrath, and Grand Central Publishing for the ARC.
3.5 stars rounded up.
Yuppies (or young urban professionals) are finally forced into the spotlight with regard to their contributions in the economic and political turmoil of the 80s. Even as a kid I had always been interested in the hyper consumerism of the mid to late 80s. I would watch movies set in this time period (mainly "Big" lol) and picture myself as a successful adult living in a lavish apartment in a big city. I think that's what drew me to this book initially and I was expecting a cultural analysis on the still-present glamorization of overconsumption and wealth. While McGrath did bring in cultural commentary when necessary, I was mostly treated to a well-researched and interesting take on the beginnings of extreme wealth disparity, namely through boomer's glorification and support of globalization, Regan-era economics and politics, and gentrification of neighborhoods. This was especially impactful with the juxtaposition of the struggling working class that Bruce Springsteen was singing about. I do wish there had been more connections drawn to the impact that this particular generation has had on the present political and economical climate, but one can generally read between the lines and connect the dots to figure out how we got to where we are today.

[Sonia R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful. Highly recommended.

[Garner Frick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a random library shelf pick up. I feel like it was all over the place. I learned a lot about the eighties but had to slog through it to do so.

[Korey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining look at the decade I was born in to but had no idea what was happening nationwide.

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Triumph of the Yuppies is about the sub-generational, er, clade of the Yuppies, as rising out of the Boomer Hippies and going on to preside over culture for a few years of the early eighties. The thesis here is that it arose out of economic conditions, which was a feedback loop on social ideas about economics. I do not think that the book does a good job of supporting its thesis, but falls upward in doing so.

In reviewing my review, I worry that it may come off sounding harsh, so clearly stated I really like this book. It feels like required reading for anyone under 50.

I do think that there is a general case for the author's idea, but this book is much more history of the 80s, and more a sociological study than a history. The scope it intends to connect about and around Yuppies is broad, which limits its level of detail - take a drink every time you think 'this paragraph could have been a book on its own'; a double if you already read that book.

The style of the book is academic, by which I mean the opposite of sometimes how that word gets used and that the writing is clear to the point of dispassionate. It is generally well-cited, and a lot of the book comes off to me more as sociology than history, reporting on the words and values of who considered themselves Yuppies. It may commit the sin of which it accuses the Yuppies in the sense that it focuses upon their values as an ideological thing, ignoring the practical of what is going on in areas of US culture that does not have the same attention, but I don't really see that as a solvable problem. Again, it is more like the other book that pairs with this one, rather than what this one must shoulder.

Overall, a very cool history and I hope a sign of more similar books to come because I think that there is a lot of value in modern political discussion about these facts, and seeing the development of various aspects of modernity, to think about different ways that it might be approached.

My thanks to the author, Tom McGrath, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Grand Central Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.

[raniera]

Finally finished. Really far weaker than it should have been. A subject that would benefit from analysis after the fact, but written like a Netflix documentary—repetitive, full of unnecessary talking heads, and never reallly gets to the meat of the issue, or the interesting stuff! Retreads a lot of ground along the way too.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an extremely good book on the economy and society of the 1980s, specifically on the rise of the young urban professionals, y'know - yuppies. To tell the tale, McGrath focuses on a handful of key individuals - Jerry Rubin, Jack Welch, Michael Milkin, and to a lesser extent Jane Fonda - to explain how American society and the Baby Boomers were transforming in the 1980s. It's more pop historian than anything academic, but it's really well done, and pretty insightful. Those people McGrath picks as anchors work really well. (Welch wasn't a Boomer, but he does exemplify how the economy was changing during the era of the yuppie.

He notes that if the 1960s were about revolution and change, and the 1970s about jaded disillusionment, then the 1980s were about improving your status and livelihood: get more money. Rubin pickedup on this trend right away and rode it pretty well. Yuppies were just a small cohort of society, but they really exemplified the trend of the time. This was an era when designer goods and upscale consumer products really took off. People would buy them BECAUSE they were seen as upscale. Grey Poupon, anyone? Sears -- aw, hell now, not that crass middle class stuff. People were watching Dallas and Dynasty, soap operas of the uber-rich, not sit-coms about Ralph Kramden. Even during the early 1980s recession, the market for luxury goods boomed. People adopted the preppie look, and old school high end stuff like Brooks Brothers took off. You should celebrate having more, because having more meant you were a WINNER.

Across the economy, a rising tide no longer lifted all boats. There were winners and losers - who would you be? Companies used to prioritize their customers and their workers, with shareholders coming a distant third. Companies like GE prioritized being a good economic citizen. Then came Jack Welch flipping the entire script upside down. The stock price went up as he laid off about 90,000 workers in various departmetns. Leveraged buyouts became a thing where you but up only a small fraction of the money for a buyout, using the value of the thing you were buying as collaterol. (Brilliant!) Wealth went up on paper, even if nothing was actually being produced. Merger-mania took place. Milken made junk bonds a thing, saying he was democratizing investment, getting out of the hoary old hands of the elitist old guard. (He later was convicted of misdeeds, which Trump pardoned him for in 2020). Corporations were no longer things that made products: they were assets to be bought, sold, broken apart, traded - whatever made the most profit.

Rubin debated Abbie Hoffman in yuppie vs. yippie things, until they got sick of each other. Jane Fonda began her workout tapes to help finance the causes of her significant other Tom Hayden, but they became so profitable, she did them for her own sake. People were more into gratification. One person noted the "three -ences" of the era: convience, indulgence, obedience. The generation had left The Graduate behind and was now about fast tracking it. You wanted your kids to go to good schools, so send them to private school. Advertizers would offer not a product, but an identity, so get th high quality one. People used to identify with what their neighbors, their fellow middle class did for what they should do. Now they looked at what the better off did.

By the late 1980s, some yuppies wanted out of the rat race. The movement began with people moving to the city, but when the started having kids, small apartments seemed like a bad idea. They fled back to the suburbs. They had lived in gentrified neighborhoods but now were in upscale suburbs, living along their own set.

The book ends with the '87 stock market crash, and notes while people celebrated the death of the yuppie, the transformation of America never went backwards. Shareholder value still reigns supreme (some corporations have started talking differently recently, but they sure don't act differently). Unequal wealth is more unequal. The middle class is more hollowed out. So many of the trends listed above never really went away. The yuppies may be gone as an identity, but the vision of America they stood for has triumphed.

This is a masterful account of the socioeconomic transformations of the 1980s, and how it's hung to us ever since. Great book.

[Elena · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book proves the adage that's it's better to do one thing well instead of five things badly.

I generally reserve 1 star ratings for books I simply can't finish, but the truth is - I only finished it for a book club. If I had just been reading it solo I would have quit, probably around a third of the way through. That's about the point where it became clear this book was not really about the Yuppies, but was instead a rather mediocre, superficial history of the early 80s. One of the members of my book club kindly stated it felt like four different New Yorker articles fighting for dominance - and if you feel that's not very kind, well, that's the kindest thing to be said about it.

Article 1: A survey of the Yuppies - who they were, how they developed as a class, and how they were defined as a class by both themself and outsiders.
Article 2: A history of the Reagan Administration.
Article 3: The deindustrialization of America.
Article 4: The accompanying divorce of Wall Street from Main Street as Wall Street expanded out of the good ole' boys club it had been previously.

Articles 2 - 4 have been written about in other, better books. Lots of them! If you're going to cover it again, you need to say something new. Using the emergence of a new (or possibly very old?) economic class would be an interesting, fresh way to see that period, and the Yuppies certainly fit the bill. Unfortunately for the readers, the first article in the list, THE YUPPIES, was the least-elaborated of the four! McGrath vacillates between defining them objectively as a group and then analyzing them, or just taking their own words for who they are/were via contemporaneous articles from the actual time, and eventually just lands on the latter choice. That is fine for a beginning - the history of the word Yuppie, as people attempted to define what they saw as a new economic class in a transitioning American is a fine start - but McGrath never goes beyond that. Who were the Yuppies, objectively? McGrath makes vague overtures to defining them as an economic elite within the Baby Boomer generations, but never actually makes a firm stand about it either way.

And that's a shame, because frankly this book could have been so much more. One of the more infuriating asides in the books is the focus on Jack Welch (born 1935, so definitely not a Yuppie). Again, several books have been written about Jack Welch. Connecting Jack Welch to the Yuppies - in fact, elaborating on his influence on the MBAs he hired, who would go on to spread his ideas throughout corporate America, would have been really fascinating. The interplay between generations isn't all on one side - it's not just Jack Welch delivering his edicts from on high, it's a whole bunch of other people listening to him and agreeing with him. Who were those people? You won't find out from this book.

Part of the problem is with McGrath himself. If a book is a window into the author's soul, I didn't get the feeling that McGrath is particularly well-read in American history prior to 1945. It's a bit hackneyed to compare the '80s to the Guilded Age, so I can see why he might want to avoid it, but McGrath doesn't even try to compare it to the 1920s. If you're going to talk about an elite, moneyed class in American, limiting the scope of the discussion to the 20 years preceding the period in question is quite limited. It's like writing about 2020-2025, and never discussing anything prior to 1995. When you put it like that, it's clearly nuts, but that's the scope of the book!

McGrath also doesn't really discuss anti-Yuppie factions or anti-Yuppie arguments in any organized manner. He brings up some surveys of people who don't like gentrification, which is a good start, and he discusses the Yuppies as a subject of satire, but nothing more. Again, it's unbelievable to write a book about the 80's with a supposed focus on the Yuppies, and never really delve into their ideology of consumerism, nor the criticism thereof. The names Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch do not appear a single time in this book, let alone any of the other cultural critiques of the actual period. How is that even possible?

Well, maybe McGrath isn't into that sort of thing. But given his background, the whole book is a missed opportunity. McGrath was the editor-in-chief of Philadelpha magazine for a not insignificant amount of time, and one of the better part of the book was his very short aside on the gentrification of Philadelphia. That had real promise for telling us something new, and also using Philly as sort of an example of the rise and fall and rise of the mid-sized Northeastern city. If he had merely used that as a framing device to talk about the Yuppies, this book would have been far better than it was. But instead he wrote the most generic book possible.

If you want to read about the 80s...well, there are a lot of good books about the period, depending on your focus. Unfortunately, a great history and analysis of the Yuppies has yet to be written - this book definitely ain't it. If you want to read a book about the Yuppies - honestly, just read The Bonfire of the Vanities instead. It's fiction, but like all truly great fiction, it's illuminating. That's more than this book can say.

[Boni · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a good outlay of all the social change that happened in this era. Expectations were increased far above those of Boomer’s parents. So many high achievers were glorified and glamorized for making fortunes. Rolex watches and Cross pens may not have been ‘worth’ the extra cost, but the cachet of the recognition, the sign of success … now that was priceless. Those are the values established in that era… where bottled water and Starbucks’ Grandes became the norm. Dessert shops, gourmet markets. Amazing! Lifestyles changed, sometimes for the better, like physical fitness trends… jogging, aerobics, gym memberships, attention to nutrition, travel… Others were superficial but spoke to perfection (house and neighborhood, home decor, vehicles, salaries, work and career ladders,…).

The lure of the MBA, to get to Wall Street. In general, a newfound interest in wealth. In the best light, it led to aspiration. In the worst, envy… or scorn. Robin Leach’s show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the Ewings of Dallas, the tongue-in-cheek The Official Preppy Handbook… all were surprisingly popular, as everyone wanted to achieve. The previous generation’s dream of building a utopian society was replaced by a focus on personal achievement and financial success.

“Finding just the right brand—one of the markers of quality—was becoming important in every consumer category. Gucci briefcases. Coach bags. Cartier watches. Ferragamo shoes. The fine craftsmanship and materials were nice. But part of the appeal of owning any of them was that most people didn’t.”

The Dukes of Hazard or Hill Street Blues. So was it the total viewership numbers that attracted advertisers… or is the demographics of that viewership more desirable. Merceds Benz bought time… but easy to guess on which show? American high end culture was tilting towards these yuppies who spent money.

The influence of the yuppie generation was best portrayed in the series of debates between Jerry Rubin, the new capitalistic Yuppie versus Abbie Hoffman, the old, value-driven Yippy. Ex -buddies turned a profit exploring their philosophical differences to paying crowds like at Red Deer, Alberta. It was pointed out that championing the Yuppy was very different from championing the Boomer Generation, since most Boomers (maybe 90 %) were not in that dog bird seat of wealth and decadence. Most were struggling. Regardless, social media) before there was social media as we know it today) had shifted the tide of left Team Abbie to right Team Jerry. Everyone entering college in the 80’s wanted to go into business… to make money. When I entered college in the 70’s, I’d never heard anyone want that. It wad too boring. We all wanted to be engineer’s or doctors or lawyers.

With Pandora’s Box of capitalism opened to young Americans, the split has ossified, at least for the 4 decades after the 80’s. This book took a great look at the cultural indicators of those times. Fed my nostalgic hunger as well as my educational.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had been teaching for a decade at a Catholic high school for girls when the 80s hit. Students in the 70s were all about service to others. They aspired to be teachers, nurses, social workers ... women who would make a positive difference in the world. I remember my colleagues and I noticing a big difference between our early 80s classes and those from the previous decade. "They are more about money, about material success, about status." "They all out for number one, can't seem to work together, it's all about competition." Now, they wanted to be lawyers, stock brokers, get MBAs. Those were some of the observations we teachers were making at the time. What turned the empathy/service switch off and the "greed is good"switch on?

After reading Tom McGrath's well-researched excellent book, I still can't answer that question, but his title says it all with respect to our current time ... the Yuppies have triumphed. The narcissistic sensibility that marked the 80s is still dominant today. The Wall Streetification of American society, at least among the advantaged and therefore powerful, is riding roughshod over the lives of the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Case in point: "The various forces that had been bubbling up over the previous few years -- looking out for number one, new energy around capitalism, new aggressiveness on Wall Street, Ronald Reagan's faith in free enterprise and free markets, young professionals' obsession with success -- were coalescing into something bigger. And among the people creating this new moment, the thing that was being used to measure almost everything was financial success." The seeds of Trumpism, of Elon Musk and the oligarchs, were being planted.

So despite the fact that Yuppies' place in the sun did not last very long and they became more of a joke than a viable movement, all these decades later we see those same questionable principles triumphant in our land. The gap between rich and poor that began accelerating in the 80s is a runaway train in the 2020's. Profit still trumps prosocial values. And there's no end in sight. Excellent analysis of a critical time.

[Benjy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, this definitely contextualized my own upbringing a bit: Raised by boomers on the Upper West Side, which McGrath weaves throughout the book as the beating heart of 1980s Yuppie culture. I came across it as part of a general project of reading decade-focused histories of the 70s-90s, a transition period that feels like it has a number of cultural and political parallels with the 2020s upheaval and vibe shift. In this case, the author’s contribution is trying to articulate a throughline for the Boomer experience in which the disdain for tradition and conformity that powered the 60s also powered the consumer excess of the 80s when the same generation reached their 30s and 40s. Most of this is stuff Millennials will be at least ambiently familiar with (Morning in America! Power suits! Sharper Image!) but it’s well organized around a few characters and cultural trends. The best is Jerry Rubin, one of the Chicago 7, who reinvented themself as a yuppie in the 1980s with the same self-promotional flair they brought their yippie days and ended up hosting a series of debates with unreconstructed rabble rouser Abbie Hoffman that helped define the ideological divides of the era. One reason these histories are helpful reading right now: For every cultural revolution that seems unstoppable in the moment there’s a backlash around the corner, but some of the changes end up more permanent than expected.

[Rhiannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

great read -- as the title says, a great exploration of how young, educated baby boomers reshaped the values and economy of the nation with ramifications for years to come (all while still being very fun to read, frankly -- there's 80s glitz coming off of every page).

my key takeaways, in their simplest form (because I'm falling asleep):
- I understand the mindset of Baby Boomers now more than I ever have, especially their "bootstraps" perspective. while I can empathize with the fact that they were coming of age in a time of economic precarity and many of them did throw themselves into working toward upward mobility (granted, many in the yuppie subsect had very privileged childhoods), i feel more frustrated than ever that they can't admit that they pulled the ladder up behind them.
- we are living in the 80s 2.0, and I fear -- the gen z/baby boomer parallels are real. I say this (as a millennial) not to be a hater, but they too are inheritors of a shitty economy (aren't we all) and many of them are image and success obsessed for the same reasons as the boomers, with the added gasoline of social media and the Internet. the greatest harbinger of boomerism though is the ruthless individualism, something that is so entrenched that many probably take it for granted. much to think about.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another respectable effort to explain how the American dream train of equality for all got "off the tracks" in the latter half of the 20th century.

As the title indicates, the author zeroes in on the cultural phenomenon of the "Yuppies," a term I have never much cared for, probably because of the figures who were prominent "Yuppies."

Taken along with many other books published in recent years that view this period through a variety of lenses, it is clear that many or most of us forgot some basic lessons, lessons which it is far from clear we have yet to realize even today.

That when any society decides to allow a relative few to garner most of the gains, that when an allegedly "wealthy country" tolerates levels of poverty, including of its children, that are the highest in the so-called "developed world," and that when we turn our political arena into a place for clowns, liars, and vile showmen, well, then, we have lost our hold on what made the dreams of this nation great.

[Eric Keisling · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation by Tom McGrath, and it’s fantastic! I highly recommend it. It reads like a Michael Lewis book and feels like a prequel to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. It tells the story of the Yuppie (Young Urban Professionals) phenomenon in the 1980s. Rather than glorifying in the greed and consumerism, McGrath does a great job of juxtaposing the wealth and spending of the Yuppies with the plight of the working class and those who lost their manufacturing jobs during the time of Wall Street greed. Also woven throughout is the story of the Reagan administration and the impact of his policies that exacerbated this phenomenon. A major through-line in the book is the story of Jerry Rubin’s conversion the capitalism after his activist days in the 1960’s and how he was a standard bearer for others in his generation who got a haircut and went corporate. The book is worth picking up.

[Gabriel Frieberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm

Certainly this book accomplished what it set out to do with it’s title. This is an exhaustive, entertaining look at the rise of the Yuppie subgroup from 1980-86 — which precipitated exponential inequality in America, but I can’t help feeling there’s more to the story.

So much time is spent on this era, but I feel like this book is only Part 1. Maybe because there’s not a rise and fall arc with Yuppies…it’s just rise…and rise. What McGrath is describing is so commonplace and twee now that this is a hardly shocking read. I would’ve liked even more here about the dark side of Yuppies — how they impacted lower classes and minorities.

In staying in the C-Suites and following villains like Mike Milken, Jack Welch, and Jerry Rubin, we breeze along without feeling too ashamed, saddened, maddened.

McGrath is a solid writer and clearly researched the hell out of this, but I honestly wouldn’t have minded a little more personality and subjectivity here — and I never say that.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting cultural history of the growing up of a segment of the Baby Boomers who went from 60s era anti-Vietnam War university students, to 1980s professionals. T McGrath complements that history with that of the hollowing out of the working and middle classes in America. McGrath himself is a Boomer/Gen X cusper. He ends his story with the 1987 stockmarket crash and the concluding chapter is a bit of a post-script of where the main players ended up and he ties it up with a bow about how it led to Trump in 2016. It's a bit of a fly by the 1990s and omits the GFC of 2008. Nonetheless, what he does accomplish about the Yuppies of the 1980s is an interesting read.

It bothered me that the book lacked a table of contents. Hopefully future editions include one. It would have been handy to see how the book was laid out and how McGrath periodizes the time span he analyzes without flipping through all 24 chapters.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never saw myself as one of them. They were horrible. They betrayed everything good about the 60s. But they were my contemporaries, and looking back now I see myself in the mirror of the 1980s more than I would like. I was never a Reaganite. I always thought that I was more self-aware than "those people." And though I went to law school and had a well paid professional job, I wasn't one of those lackeys of capitalism. Was I? Hell no, I was helping artists. But they were very well paid artists who paid me well for my services, so how was I any better? In the end, wasn't I contributing to the culture of inequality that metastasized into the huge cancerous tumor on society that we have today? I didn't think so at the time, and I mostly don't think so today, but maybe I was more complicit than I'd like to admit.

[JennyB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. I was still a kid during the yuppie era, but i do remember the hype about it. And while McGrath covers the associated cultural ephemera that went along with yuppiedom (conspicuous consumption, and using labels from products large to small -Porsche, Piaget, Perrier- to say something about who you were), he also gets at the deeper cultural currents behind all this as well. The drive to succeed after growing up in the economic insecurity of the 70s, the desire to reject the boring suburban background where one was brought up, the compulsion to achieve more and more and more because there's no such thing as enough. McGrath doesn't insist on this, but as i read this, the parallels between the 80s and now are numerous -- it struck me that we are living the same moment in America all over again. Nothing new under the sun, history repeats itself, big sigh.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Gen X daughter to late end silent generation parents who embraced the ethos of the 1960s with their gardening, canning, cooking from scratch, reusing/recycling, camping and hiking in the mountains, and maintaining a large folk-music record collection, my exposure to the Yuppies came only through mainstream media - movies like Baby Boom, The Big Chill, Wall Street, Three Men, and a Baby, and Working Girl, television shows like Thirtysomething and LA Law, and books like Bonfire of the Vanities and Lisa Birnbach's College Book. So it was fascinating to get an indepth look at the creation of Yuppie-dom and their rise from this book. I think it's safe to say that I was far more fortunate in that I was raised in the 1960s ethos than that of the Yuppies.

[Sri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense deja vu the whole time I was reading this. Though this book is a close look at a particular moment in history (the 80s), I see the same core themes reflected in the reactionary cycles that have become dreadfully familiar to us today, in workplace attitudes and consumer behaviors that in turn perpetuate the social, political and economic conditions that provoke the same attitudes and behaviors in tenfold. A really thorough exploration of the beginnings of the hyperindividualistic, hyperconsumerist, relentless neoliberal obsession with self-optimization that we find it impossible to disentangle from today as Americans, and that has now spread globally like a disease via Western imperialism and mass media.

[Kathleen (itpdx) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a Boomer. It is interesting to step back and examine what was happening around me as I lived. My sociology focus was more on feminism—the changes wrought by more women in nontraditional work rolls, more women in elected office, etc. But these changes in life goals and consumerism were going on at the same time and in concert with those changes. This is an interesting and entertaining look at the eighties and where we went from there.

[Kevin Schafer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having recently read the OG article that introduced the term Yuppie, this book was a fun read of a particular cultural moment- a cultural moment that has been parodied to death. This attempted to thread a couple of needles and managed to get most of to a manageable place but compared to the works of Perlstein, it feels a little light. Indicative that there was (almost) no mention of race-it is taken for granted that the Yuppie phenomena was mostly a white cultural trend.