The Long Life of Yuppie Scum

TRIUMPH OF THE YUPPIES: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation, by Tom McGrath

In 1967, a bushy-haired Jerry Rubin walked onto the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange with a few friends and flung dollar bills down to the trading floor. Rubin, a co-founder of the activist group the Yippies, was delighted when the traders on the floor piled on top of one another to grab the money.

A decade and a half later, Rubin went back to Wall Street — as a securities analyst. “Politics and rebellion distinguished the ’60s,” Rubin wrote in a New York Times opinion piece announcing his surprising new job. “Money and financial interest will capture the passion of the ’80s.” Rubin had gone from Yippie co-founder to yuppie elder statesman.

In his breezy history, “Triumph of the Yuppies,” Tom McGrath sets out to explain the social and cultural transformation that Rubin embodied. What happened in the 1980s? Why did the United States suddenly fall in love with finance while inequality skyrocketed? And what, McGrath asks, did the yuppies have to do with it?

Yuppies — the young urban professionals who flocked to cities to renovate old townhouses, eat at interesting restaurants and make lots of money — were a fraught psychographic from the jump. The word showed up in print as early as 1980, in a Chicago magazine story questioning the notion that a yuppie-led “urban renaissance” was underway in cities across the country.

But something was happening. Recent college grads were choosing cities over suburbs. And, as the journalists who kept writing articles about them kept pointing out, the yuppies were not even pretending that they didn’t care about money.

McGrath, the former editor in chief of Philadelphia magazine, makes this open pursuit of wealth his central theme as he alternates among snapshots of yuppies, the national political scene and major figures in American business.