My book, Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, will be published by Harvard University Press in May 2026.
It reveals how the emergence of a new highly-educated class—young urban professionals, or “yuppies”— fostered new forms of work, leisure, and politics, transformed cities, and, ultimately, produced our current age of inequality. In the 1980s, Wall Street experienced explosive growth, unseating industry at the center of the American economy. This new order gave rise to a new kind of worker: the yuppie.
They may not have been the plutocrats directing the course of financialization, but yuppies were the soldiers on the front lines who enacted this new mode of accumulation, trade by trade and deal by deal. At banks, they extracted profits from the husks of industrial companies, forever destabilizing the structures that had provided stable employment for the middle and working classes. At law firms, they devised the mergers and takeovers which eroded the power and wages of those same workers. As consumers, yuppies created a new culture that legitimated their position atop the stratified society they had made. As city-dwellers, they were handmaidens to an extreme and even deadly stage of redevelopment. And as donors and voters, yuppies engineered a takeover of local and national politics, using their wealth to back candidates who would remake society in their image. Yuppies were, in short, not just a stereotype. They were the authors of a more unequal chapter in American life.