We additionally meet Richard Thalheimer, scion of an Arkansas division retailer empire, who parlayed jobs promoting encyclopedias, yogurt machines and photocopier provides into the Sharper Picture, a $60 million catalog enterprise that peddled devices akin to digital watches, BMW-shaped pillows and fits of armor.
McGrath even takes us again to among the unique writers, like Rottenberg and Cathy Crimmins, who helped popularize the time period “yuppie” of their regional reporting for Chicago journal and Philadelphia Metropolis Paper, respectively.
‘Gluttonous Need for Wealth’
Pointedly, for our modern period, McGrath offers texture to the dire financial scenario that surrounded the yuppies’ rise: how their transfer into cities was catalyzed partially by generational downward mobility, mixed with double-digit mortgage charges that put house possession out of attain; and the way they spent their cash lavishly — nearly nihilistically —as a result of rampant double-digit inflation disincentivized saving or contemplating the longer term.
A gluttonous need for wealth finally led the yuppies to assist dissolve post-war political orthodoxies like company accountability for its employees, progressive revenue tax on higher-wage earners and protections for unions and American jobs.
These led them to help right-winger Ronald Reagan and his supply-side economics. Panaceas akin to tax cuts for the rich, shrinking of presidency packages, deregulation of business and deficit navy spending emerged as de rigueur Republican positions.
McGrath particulars the ruinous historic outcomes: The wealthy acquired richer, whereas everybody else floundered. Center-class manufacturing jobs have been shipped abroad as executives privileged shareholder worth and their very own compensation. Social packages have been slashed, harming working folks and the susceptible.
Huge Highs, Huge Lows
The yuppies, at the least for a time, acquired precisely what they wished. Wall Road boomed, using an unprecedented wave of low cost cash and ushering within the iconic period the place greed was good. Till it wasn’t. The market, and the yuppie attract, crashed in 1987.
That these similar financial and social tensions are political flashpoints right now shouldn’t be a shock, McGrath argues. Yuppies at the moment are in control of the nation’s monetary, political and authorized establishments, their legacy a blueprint for a litany of up to date horrors.
These embody ever-increasing revenue disparity, a celebration of ruthlessness, punitive disregard for employees and the setting, a reckless worship of short-term achieve and an insatiable fetishization of manufacturers.
He even ties our modern worship of venality, callousness, lying and flash to the foundational roots of that almost all ’80s of characters: Donald Trump.
McGrath focuses nearly solely on white, heterosexual yuppies, ignoring racial and ethnic permutations and avoiding (maybe too kindly) the pioneering position that ’70s city queers had in establishing the gentrifying DINK (Double Earnings No Child) way of life of brownstone renovations, bistros and bars, non-public gyms and conspicuous consumption.
Triumph of the Yuppies is without delay illuminating and intensely miserable, a reminder of the havoc the boomer technology has wrought — and can proceed to wreak, because it now plans to stay endlessly. However the guide additionally offers a helpful reverse roadmap for reviving a extra humane existence.