AI Summary
5 min readIn 1979, only one in 30 seniors at the University of Pennsylvania headed to Wall Street. By 1987, it was one in three. At Yale, 40 percent of the graduating class of 1985 applied to work at just one investment bank: First Boston. A Wall Street recruiter said in 1987 that “easily 50 percent of Wall Street is 35 or under.” These numbers mark the arrival of a new social type—the young urban professional, or yuppie—who, historian Dylan Gottlieb argues, did not just populate American cities but utterly remade them, along with the country’s economy, politics, and culture. Gottlieb’s book Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York traces how this class emerged, what it displaced, and why its legacy still shapes urban life today.
The economic machinery that created the yuppie
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:21) **The Yuppie Defined** - Historian Dylan Gottlieb introduces the core subject: the young urban professional as both a media stereotype and a real force that reshaped American cities.
- 2 (02:40) **Yuppies vs. the Creative Class** - Gottlieb distinguishes the yuppie from the later "creative class," emphasizing that yuppies had both cultural capital and actual financial capital to price others out.
- 3 (05:57) **The Perfect Storm: Financialization Creates the Yuppie** - Gottlieb explains the economic deregulation and structural changes that created an immense demand for young, elite workers on Wall Street and in Big Law.
- 4 (08:41) **A Social Revolution: Who Got to Be a Yuppie** - The demand for labor coincided with the diversification of elite universities, creating a new, more diverse professional class and cementing a belief in meritocracy.
- 5 (12:35) **The Devil's Bargain's Legacy** - Gottlieb argues the new diverse elite used its diversity to justify the extraction of value from the rest of society, a hallmark of rising inequality.
- 6 (15:02) **The City's Bargain: Reviving New York Through Yuppies** - New York City, near bankruptcy in the mid-70s, deliberately oriented its revival strategy toward attracting affluent young professionals, a choice with violent consequences.
- 7 (17:49) **Violent Displacement as a Tool** - Gottlieb reveals the intentional violence, including landlord arson, used to clear neighborhoods for yuppie influx, directly linking this to the creation of homelessness.
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Show Notes
Back in the eighties – when pop music drowned in synths, the volume of everyone's hair was set to loud, and neon was in vogue – a new age dawned: the era of the yuppie. “Yuppie” comes from the acronym “YUP” – which stands for young, urban professional. Think Patrick Bateman from American Psycho or even Miranda Hobbes from Sex and the City. Nowadays, cities are full of young urban professionals, but this wasn't always the case. In his new book, Yuppies: the Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, author Dylan Gottlieb argues that New York City was the first city to reorganize itself to cater to yuppies. And it's not just cities that have changed. Yuppies have transformed our country's economy, politics, and culture, too.
Brittany is joined by Dylan, assistant professor of history at Bentley University, to break down how yuppies catapulted us into our current moment.
For more episodes on the history that explains our culture today, check out:
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Were Americans actually healthier in the past?
Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluse
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