Excerpt from Barbara
Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989)
Like every other social group
to rise to fleeting prominence, the yuppies were as much invented as
discovered. The term was first employed in the press for the modest
purpose of explaining Gary Hart's unexpected success in the 1984 presidential
primaries. Someone had voted for him, someone young, urban, and professional,
and there was brief hope that this new grouping would provide the Democrats
with a much-needed new constituency. But what started as a neutral demographic
category evolved with alarming speed into a social slur. Four years after their
"discovery," Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in Esquire:
Yuppie is now understood almost universally as a term of abuse ...... You're a yuppie" is taken to mean not "you're a young urban professional" but rather "you have lousy values."
Yuppie is a hybrid category-a mixture of
age, address, and class. Other social classes are, in the middle-class
imagination, age address and class. Other social classes are, in the
middle-class imagination, age groups too: the poor as children, blue collar workers
as stern though somewhat pitable fathers. But yuppies were by definition young
adults, and thus subject to the moral judgments that older, 'and more
established people routinely pass on the young. From one angle, yuppies were
the good children so sorely missed by neoconservatives- like Midge Decter in
the sixties and early seventies. They did not waste time "finding
themselves" or joining radical movements. They plunged directly into the
economic mainstream, earning and spending with equal zest. To Newstveek, the
yuppie eagerness to "go for it" was a healthy sign of the
"yuppie virtues of imagination, daring and entrepreneurship."
But they were also the very worst
children, the apotheosis of middle-class forebodings about the corrupting
effects of affluence. No one hurled the still-potent diagnosis of permissive-
ness at them, perhaps because by the eighties the word referred to so much more
than childraising practices. Yet here they were, displaying that dread trait
customarily assigned to the poor-"inability to defer
gratification"-and even the desperate "orality" Oscar Lewis had
once detected in the culture of poverty. Yuppies did not devote their youth to
"that patient overcoming and hard-won new attainment" that Decter had
endorsed as the prerequisite to adult middle-class life. They did not study;
they "networked." They did not save; they spent. And they did not
spend on houses or station wagons, but on Rolex watches, Porsches, quick trips
to Aruba, and, most notoriously, high-status foods. In its "Year of the
Yuppie" cover story, Newsweek found them on "a new plane of
consciousness, a state of Transcendental Acquisition."
Yuppies, of course, did not turn out to
be a new constituency for liberalism. Their "virtues" of
entrepreneurship and acquisition made them for the most part conservatives,
though not in the fervid, ideological style of the neoconservatives or the New
Right. Yuppies thought of themselves as members of an elite whose interests
might naturally collide with those of the lower classes: They lived in
gentrified neighborhoods from which the unsightly poor had been freshly
cleared; they worked for firms intent on minimizing the "labor costs"
of blue- and pink-collar workers; their lifestyle was supported by the labor of
poorly paid, often immigrant, service workers- housekeepers, restaurant
employees, messengers, and delivery "boys." Although they parted
company with the New Right on the social issues, such as abortion and women's
rights, self- interest kept them reliably Republican.
Yet, despite their political
conservatism, everyone sensed that the yuppies were somehow connected to that
last period of youthful assertiveness, the sixties. Some commentators presented
them as grown-up radicals, covertly bearing the heritage of the sixties into
the corporate rat race of the eighties. It was possible in fact to have been a
radical in the first decade and a self-centered hustler in the second, as Jerry
Rubin's transformation from rebel to networking impresario illustrates. The
very word yuppie had originally been coined in 1983 to describe Rubin's
transition from a "yippie"-the acronym for the anarcho-hippie Youth
International Party organized by Rubin and Abbie Hoffman-to prototypical young
urban professional. Newsweek saw yuppies as the "vanguard of the
baby-boom generation, which had "marched through the '60s" and was
now speed[ing] toward the airport, advancing on the 1980s in the back seat of a
limousine."
Actually, the stereotypical yuppie, who
was about thirty in 1984, was more likely to have spent the sixties bicycling
around the neighborhood than marching on Washington. With equal disregard for
the normal length of generations, yuppies were sometimes presented as the
rebellious children of sixties radicals, who, in a stunning reprisal, were now
horrifying their parents with their self-centeredness and political
conservatism. Actor Michael J. Fox, the only yuppie actually pictured in Esquire's
"Days of Wine and Sushi" cover story, can ordinarily he found in
a sitcom whose single sustaining joke is the clash between Fox and his gentle,
sensitive, sixties-generation parents.
What yippies and yuppies did share was
their class. Despite the frequent confusion of yuppies and baby-boomers in
general, yuppies-defined by lifestyle and income-made up only about 5 percent
of their generation. They were exemplars not of their generation but of their
class, the same professional middle class that had produced the student rebels.
Like the sixties rebels, the yuppies were at the cutting edge of their class, a
kind of avant-garde, charting a new direction and agenda. They were also, in
their own way, rebels. Both radicals and yuppies rejected the long, traditional
path to middle-class success, but the defining zeal of the yuppies was to join
an- other class-the rich.
The actual number of demographically official yuppies-
people born between 1945 and 1959, earning over $40,000 a year in a
professional or managerial occupation, and living in urban areas-was only about
1.5 million, hardly enough to warrant excitement. If yuppies were further
defined as greedy, shallow people prone to burble about the joys of real estate
investment, like those depicted in Newsweek's cover story, then, as a
commentator in the New Republic observed, there were probably no more
than 113 of them nationwide. But there was certainly a yuppie style of work and
consumption, as well as what could be called a yuppie strategy for success, and
these embraced, to a greater or lesser extent, many thousands of middle-class
people beyond the demographic category. Here I will use yuppie in a loose,
rather than demographically precise, sense, for someone who adopted the
strategy and more or less fit the style. Hardly anyone, of course, deserves to
bear the full burden of the stereotype.
But even the stereotype plays an important role in our
chronicle of emerging class awareness. With the image of the yuppie, the
normally invisible, normally "normal" middle class finally emerged in
the mass media as a distinct group with its own ambitions, habitats, and tastes
in food and running gear. The class usually privileged to do the discovering
and naming of classes had itself been discovered by the media and, with scant
respect for its dignity, named with a diminutive that rhymes with puppy.
Of course, those who followed the yuppie strategy did not
represent all of their class. They were a select segment, just as the right's
version of the New Class had been a selected subset of the larger professional
middle class. In fact, the two groups -yuppie and New Class-are, technically
speaking, complementary. The New Class, as defines by the neoconservatives, was
that part of the professional middle class that finds an occupational home in
the media, in the public sector, and in the nonprofit world exemplified by the
university, the foundation, the social-welfare agency. And the New Class, by
the right's definition, was solidly and unrepentently liberal.
The yuppies, on the other hand, represented the more than
60 percent of the middle class that earns its living in the direct service of
corporate power, as executives, corporate lawyers, and other sorts of
business-employed professionals, consultants, or brokers. They were the
fulfillment of the neoconservatives' dream that "intellectuals," or
at least members of the professional middle class, might abandon any remaining
concerns for the lower classes and become the trusted courtiers of the
corporate elite.
But the very frivolity of yuppies-and hence of the very subject
of yuppies-was a distraction from the deeper changes their appearance
signaled. In the eighties, the class contours of American society were
undergoing a seismic shift. The extremes of wealth and poverty moved further
apart, and, as if stretched beyond the limit of safety, the ground in the
middle began to tremble and crack. Whole occupational groups and
subpopulations-farmers, steelworkers, single mothers- began to tumble toward
the bottom. Other groups-lower- level white-collar employees, schoolteachers,
even higher- status professionals and their families-found themselves
scrambling to remain in place.
In the confusion, only one group, outside of the very rich,
seemed to have a clear strategy for success. And perhaps it was because that
strategy involved such a betrayal of traditional middle-class values-such a
wholesale surrender to the priorities of profit and the pleasures of
consurnerism--that the media turned so quickly against those who followed it.
Implicit in the media's half-mocking, half-indulgent "discovery" of
yuppies was the incipiently liberal understanding that their strategy might
not, after all, be the way to go.
It was possible, until the eighties, for a
comfortable American to think of class as a form of cultural diversity,
parallel to ethnicity or even "lifestyle." The emphasis had been on
the culture of poverty, or of the supposedly parochial sub- culture of the
working class. In the mass media, class often
appeared to be a way of life, even a set of options adding color and
texture to an otherwise increasingly homogeneous America. In 1985, for example,
a sidebar in U.S. News and World Report titled "Beatniks, Preppies,
and Punkers: The Love Affair with Labels" juxtaposed, as "categories"
of Americans, both faddists and economic groups:
VALLEY GIRLS, 1981 ... fun-loving teens with materialistic
values and their own style of dress (leg warmers, cut-out sweatshirts) ...
UNDERCLASS, 1982 ... a part of the American population
seemingly mired in poverty.
YUPPIES, 1984.
. . "young urban professionals" . . . [known for their] consumerist
lifestyle.
But there is another, much dryer and less
judgmental way of thinking about class: as an index defined solely by money-
who has it and who doesn't. In the 1980s, this grimmer view of class became
harder than ever to avoid. Those who "had" had more than ever, and
those who "had not" were more numerous, and more undeniably
miserable, than at any time since poverty was "discovered."
Sometime in the late sixties American
society had begun to lurch off the track leading to the American dream of
affluence and equality. No one could have known it at the time, but those were
the last years in which economic inequality among Americans declined. Since
then, in a sharp reversal of the equalizing trend that had been under way since
shortly after World War 11, the extremes of wealth have grown farther apart and
the middle has lost ground. Some economists even began to predict that the middle
class-defined simply as those with middling amounts of money-would disappear
altogether, leaving America torn, like many third-world societies, between an
af- fluent minority and an army of the desperately poor. . . .
Many arbitrary factors determined
whether a given family moved up or down: Had they purchased a house before the
real estate boom of the seventies? Had they refrained from having too many
children? Were they able to get help from their parents? By and large, though,
the new cleavage in the middle range of income followed familiar class lines.
The blue-collar working class was skidding downward, while the professional
middle class was holding its own or gaining ground: In 1987 the median income
for men with five or more years of higher education was $34,731, and that for
women with the same education was $26,399-or $61,130 for a couple. A
high-school-educated working-class couple earned a total of $36,888, more than
a third less.
The
phrase the disappearing middle class, which I, among others, used to
describe the enormous changes of the eighties, in some ways missed the point.
It was the blue-collar working class that was "disappearing," at
least from the middle range of comfort. In the New Right's imagination the
working class was a precious avatar of "traditional values," a human
bulwark against permissiveness. But to the business interests that commanded
the New Right's deepest loyalties, the American blue-collar working class-with
its once-strong unions and real tradition of workplace defiance-had become a
burden.
Beginning in the seventies, the
corporate elite did everything possible to shake this burden loose. They
"out-sourced" their manufacturing jobs to the lower-paid and more
intimidated work force of the third world. They shifted their capital from
manufacturing to the quick-profit realm of financial speculation-corporate
mergers, leveraged buyouts-leaving American plants and technology to decay. And
they led a brutal assault on the wages and living standards of those who still
had jobs to cling to. For it is well to remember that what we call the working
class, and picture as people striving to make a living, exists in the business
literature only as labor costs. . ..
Middle-class people, professionals and
managers, also suffered in the economic dislocations of the eighties. They too
lost jobs when plants closed or when government-financed social-welfare
agencies shut down their services. They too experienced the stresses of a
polarizing society*, in which the poor were becoming ever more desperate and
the rich were becoming more numerous and brash. While the poor were
increasingly to be avoided for safety's sake, the rich presented a different
kind of threat to people in the middle: bidding up the cost of real estate to
astronomical values and uncomplainingly accepting college tuitions in the range
of $20,000 a year. If staying in the economic and social middle ground had
become impossible for much of the working class, it had also become a challenge
for those whose education and occupation entitled them to believe they were the
middle class.
But the professional middle class is
more resilient than those below it. A laid-off manager is more likely to find a
decent-paying job than a laid-off assembly-line worker. Public-sector
professionals, like doctors, social workers, and administrators, can switch
over to the private sector when the funds for public services are cut. And
compared to blue- or pink-collar workers, white-collar professionals are in a
better position to negotiate higher pay to meet the rising costs of housing and
education. Above all, the young of the professional middle class are flexible.
Starting in the seventies, they began to abandon the long, penurious path
leading to professional status, and to go for the money. . .
The first element of what might be
called the “yuppie strategy” was to choose a college major that corporate
recruiters would look favorably upon. In one short decade, American campuses
went from being hotbeds of dissent to hothouses for the production of corporate
cadres. Between the early seventies and the early eighties, the number of
students receiving bachelor's degrees in English fell by almost 50 percent,
while the number graduating with degrees in business nearly doubled. The social
sciences also took an almost 50 percent cut, and mathematics and the natural
sciences-which presumably are essential for the future technological
competitiveness of the United States-could together claim fewer than 4 percent
of the college seniors graduating in 1983.
Students were also choosing to avoid the
prolonged deprivations associated with graduate study. In the sciences, for
example, the share of doctorates awarded to American sw4'dents by U.S.
institutions fell from 76.3 percent in 1978 to 63 percent in 1986. In that
year, for the first time, U.S. universities awarded more Ph.D.s in engineering
to foreigners than to Americans. The Americans had, so to speak, a better
offer. They were skipping graduate school in favor of corporate jobs offering
high starting salaries. As an engineering graduate student explained to the New
York Times:
One of the big things is being poor for a long period of time. If you can get a bachelor's and go out and make $30,000 or $40,000 a year, why get $10,000 a year as a graduate student?
There
had been a time when ambitious students saw corporate employment as an option
for the intellectually handicapped. Now it was the professions that seemed like
a dull, low-paid backwater compared to the brisk world of business.
The choice of a pragmatic,
business-oriented major was not always made happily. Many of the college
students I talked to in the mid-eighties were suffering from what might be
called “premature pragmatism." They were putting aside, at far too early
an age, their idealism and intellectual
curiosity in favor of economic security, which was increasingly defined
as wealth. A young woman interviewed by Newsweek had switched from
social work to sales because "I realized that I would have to make a
commitment to being poor to be a social
worker." Similarly, a Smith student, who happened to be one of few
activists on that campus at the time, told me she had given up her ambition to
be a psychiatric social worker be- cause she "couldn't live on that."
Instead, she said wryly, she would be going into banking.
To an adult who might have defined social
work as an eminently respectable middle-class career, decisions such as these
seemed either ill-informed or childishly greedy. But in the shifting economic
landscape of the eighties, what had once been a secure middle-class occupation
might no longer pro- vide the necessities, such as home ownership, of
middle-class life. All over the country, students who had started out wanting
to be environmental chemists, special-education teachers, public
administrators, or novelists redirected their aspirations to business or law.
They did so, in most cases, out of a sullen sense of necessity, trading off
personal autonomy, idealism, and creativity for what they hoped would be safety
and possibly comfort.
With nineteen-year-olds redirecting their
energies from sociology to spreadsheets, a negative, self-centered mood settled
over the campuses. UCLA's annual survey of undergraduate attitudes found a
steady rise in avarice and a decline in "altruism and social
concern." In 1987, for example, a record 73 percent of students reported
"being very well off financially" as their top goal, compared to 39
percent in 1970. Only 16 percent were interested in doing something to preserve
the environment, compared to 45 percent in 1972. In other areas, students were
now at least as conservative as the general public: Only 21 percent
favored legalizing marijuana in 1987, compared to 53 percent in 1977. In 1984,
only 49 percent believed abortion should be available to married women, down
from 68 percent in the seventies. Peter Carlson, a former sixties radical,
returned to his old dorm room at Boston University in 1986 to find
posters of Miss Piggy, Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie, Ker- mitthe
Frog ... a mural-sized photo of a
bottle of Cordon Rouge champagne popping its cork, a poster of elegant
sushi arrangements ... and a cartoon
captioned, "Shop till you drop." Almost lost amid this collage of
cuteness, I spied a postcard of Ron and Nancy atop a desk. I wondered: Is that
a genuine hommage or some sort of ironic protest?
It was a genuine hommage.
A lucky, highly publicized minority of
the new generation of pragmatists leaped directly from the academy to instant
wealth. Beginning in the late seventies, graduates of Harvard Law School and a
few other elite, business-oriented institutions could expect to be courted with
starting salaries above $40,000 a year. In Wall Street's bustling money
factories, the goal of amassing a million by age thirty was neither uncommon
nor entirely unrealistic. Baby high-rollers were proliferating, and New York's
$50-a-lunch restaurants were jammed, by the late eighties, with fresh-faced
young people barely above drinking age. These financial prodigies were, in at
least one sense, the true descendants of the sixties radicals: They had scorned
the arduous apprenticeship traditionally required for middle-class
membership-scorned, in fact, the middle class itself.
Most young graduates, however, could
expect to attain eventual incomes only in the modest $30,000 to $40,000 range.
For the majority who did not enter adult life with a legacy of Manhattan real
estate, or who lacked the sangfroid for investment banking, the second rule of
the yuppie strategy applied: Marry a financial equal. A 1976 ad for Psychology
Today laid out the possibility of upward mobility through a new, more
androgynous, approach to marriage. The ad, which ran full-page in the New
York Times, shows a smiling young couple wearing identical pin-stripe
jackets. The text begins in large bold letters, our bank can't tell us
apart," and continues:
Which one of us makes $20,000? We both do. And we
like to spend it on the same kinds of things,
too ...
Now that we're' married, we have twice as
much money and twice
as much savings.
We'll be traveling farther. And a lot more often.
We'll also get to play more tennis. Spend more
weekends skiing. Or camping.
And, now, we can have our once-a-month wine and
cheese party, once-a-week.
I guess we know what we want from life.
And with twice as much money we not only can put
more into it, we can get more out of it.