“As recently as the mid-seventies, under 5% of Ivy Leaguers are headed to Wall Street. It’s actually not that attractive. But as Wall Street’s deregulated, it changes the incentive structure — it makes it much more profitable and demands this huge labor force.” — Dylan Gottlieb

They stalked the sidewalks of Manhattan in button-down shirts embroidered with the names of investment banks. They jogged. They drank Beaujolais Nouveau. They gentrified neighborhoods. They were the Yuppies — and with the Boston-based Dylan Gottlieb, they’ve found their young urban professional biographer.

In Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, Gottlieb offers both a social history of financialization and a collective biography of the professional class that came of age in the Reagan years. Rather than a passing 1980s stereotype, Gottlieb argues that the Yuppie is a phenomenon that remade the American economy, city, and political class. As recently as the mid-1970s, under 5 percent of Ivy League graduates went to Wall Street. A decade of deregulation later, banks were recruiting a third of graduating classes from top universities. The sweatshop of the meritocracy was born. Most of us are still sweating.

Five Takeaways

• From Yippie to Yuppie. The word dates from a Chicago alt-weekly in the late 1970s. It achieved full cultural dominance in 1984 with Gary Hart’s presidential campaign. Named something that was already happening. Didn’t create it.

• The Incentive Structure Changed. Under 5% of Ivy Leaguers went to Wall Street in the mid-seventies. By the mid-eighties: a third of graduating classes at top universities. Deregulation made finance enormously more profitable. Finance demanded a large educated workforce. The most talented students followed the money.

• Democratization and Distinction. Jewish lawyers could now make partner. Women entered investment banks. Black and Asian Americans got a foot in the door. Simultaneously, that newly diversified elite pulled further from the rest of America — extracting profits and rents. More diverse and more remote at the same time.

• The Pyramid to Cylinder Shift. AI is about to do to the Yuppie what the Yuppie did to everybody else. Investment banks moving from pyramid to cylinder employment: smaller base, fewer entry-level workers. The pipeline that created the Yuppie generation is narrowing.

• Are the Yuppies Becoming Socialists? Academics, doctors, journalists — all worse off than forty years ago. Housing costs prohibitive. AI threatening entry-level pipelines. Will the professional class see their plight as similar to the Amazon worker’s? Or will meritocratic myth-making hold them back from solidarity?

About the Guest

Dylan Gottlieb is Assistant Professor of History at Bentley University and the author of Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York (Harvard University Press, May 12, 2026).

References

Yuppies by Dylan Gottlieb (Harvard University Press, May 12, 2026): hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248977
Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of a College-Educated Working Class

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

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Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: Yuppies and the Scheiber connection
00:01:40 Cambridge: a suburb of New York?
00:02:06 Where did the word Yuppie come from?
00:03:15 Gary Hart, 1984, and the Yuppie enters politics
00:03:49 Personal stake: watching Princeton students go to Wall Street
00:04:46 Under 5% of Ivy Leaguers on Wall Street in the mid-seventies
00:06:00 Fortune 500 vs. Wall Street: how the prestige destination changed
00:07:18 Mourning or celebrating the rise of the Yuppie?
00:08:15 The double movement: democratization and distinction
00:11:00 The sweatshop of the meritocracy
00:15:00 Gary Hart and the Yuppie political takeover
00:40:00 The pyramid to cylinder shift: AI and the end of entry-level finance
00:44:57 The Scheiber mutiny: the professional class becomes the working class
00:46:36 Are Yuppies becoming socialists?
00:49:09 Precariat of the world, unite
00:49:31 The theory of the unleisured class