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For many, the 1980s were about The Preppy Handbook, Jane Fonda workout videos and MTV. Tom McGrath associates the “Decade of Greed” with those touchstones—but he also sees a darker, less cartoonish side. The Media resident’s new book, Triumph of the Yuppies (Grand Central Publishing, 321 pages), explores how the country took a divisive hard turn that still haunts us today.
“There’s a divide in America,” McGrath says. “There are the educated and affluent—and everybody else. The Yuppies were [the former]. It started in the ’80s, and the rift has deepened. You see it in today’s income inequality and the cultural power that belongs to an elite group.”
“Yuppie” is shorthand for the young urban professionals who came to define the fast-paced world of conspicuous consumption that prevailed in the Reagan era. McGrath breaks down the Yuppie lifestyle into a few key components: “[They had] fast-track careers, a commitment to fitness and sophistication about food. What tied them together was the idea of optimizing your life—excelling, being your best, experiencing the best.”
For nearly 10 years, this version of the good life was the glorified ideal. “Yuppies wanted to live successfully in every way,” McGrath says. “They wanted high-priced careers. They wanted gourmet food. They were going to work out a lot and buy products that were the best—and they wanted people to know they had them. There was a big emphasis on status.”
This is the third book for the 60-year-old McGrath, who wrote about MTV in 1996 and coauthored a fitness manual in 2007. He was Philadelphia Magazine’s editor from 2010 to 2020 and now writes and curates the online Substack publication Common Good, which addresses 21st-century politics, economy, culture and life.
McGrath has always been fascinated by the Yuppie phenomenon, even if he was a bit too young—“and a little too poor”—to take part. His agent shopped the concept, and Grand Central Publishing (an imprint of New York’s Hachette Book Group) was interested. “I thought it was a good idea,” says Colin Dickerman, Grand Central’s nonfiction editorial director, who served as editor for the project. “I was born in 1969. I lived through it and remembered the pop culture part of it, but I didn’t consider the larger ramifications of it and what it left us with.”
McGrath sees supply-side “Reaganomics” and extreme income disparity as key ’80s components that have carried into the present. While tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate America helped many to prosper at greater rates, it was also a period fueled by junk bonds. Pioneered by the likes of Michael Milken, they promised high rates of return—and risk. “Reagan said, ‘Government is the problem, not the solution.’ You see that in the current Republican Party,” McGrath says.
Triumph of the Yuppies hones in on Jerry Rubin, the counterculture hero of the 1960s and ’70s who later became a stockbroker and an entrepreneur. Rubin was one of the founders of the Youth International Party, whose followers became known as Yippies. Donning a coat and tie in the 1980s, he aligned with Yuppies. “He made an incredible personal transformation and goes from one of the quintessential radicals of the 1960s to one of the quintessential Yuppies of the 1980s,” McGrath says. “His values changed.”
The book’s grand finale is the stock market crash of 1987—a time when media outlets were “literally writing obituaries” for the Yuppies. It was near the end of the Reagan era and the start of George Bush Sr.’s “kinder, gentler” America. “That lasted about six months,” notes McGrath.
As for today, “the aesthetic has changed,” McGrath says. “People who are well educated and affluent are dressing down and not always showing their wealth. That doesn’t mean the divide isn’t there—it’s more there than ever.”
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