In the 1980s, finance replaced manufacturing as the core of the American economy. This new order gave rise to a new kind of worker, a highly-educated class of young urban professionals, or “yuppies,” who fostered new forms of work, leisure, and politics. In his new book, Dylan Gottlieb argues that they were not just a stereotype. They were the authors of a more unequal chapter in our nation’s life.
They may not have been the plutocrats directing financialization, but they were on the front lines, enacting this new mode of accumulation, trade by trade, deal by deal. At banks, they extracted profits from industry, destabilizing companies that had provided stable employment. At law firms, they devised the mergers and takeovers which eroded the power and wages of the middle and working classes. In city neighborhoods, they were handmaidens to extreme gentrification. As donors and voters, they took over local and national politics, using their wealth to back candidates who remade society in their image. As consumers and creatives, they produced a culture that legitimated their position in this new stratified world.
Sharon Zukin, Professor Emerita (Graduate Center / Brooklyn College, CUNY) and the author of several award-winning studies of cultural and economic change in late 20th c. New York City, joins in conversation.