Yuppie

Yuppie (short for "young urban professional" or "young upwardly mobile professional")^[1][2] is a term that refers to a member of the upper middle class or upper class in their 20s or 30s.^[3] It first came into use in the early-1980s and largely faded from American popular culture in the late-1980s, due to the 1987 stock market crash and the early 1990s recession. However it has been used in the 2000s and 2010s, in places such as in National Review, The Weekly Standard, and Details.^[4][5][6]

Characteristics

Yuppies are joked around of for their conspicuous personal consumption and hunger over attention social status among their peers,Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever, has remarked, "When people were denouncing yuppies, they had considerably lower incomes than yuppies, so the things yuppies spent their money on seemed frivolous and unnecessary from their vantage point."^[4] Pro-skateboarder and businessman Tony Hawk has said that yuppies give "us visions of bright V-neck sweaters with collars underneath, and all that was vile in the eighties", and he has remarked as well as that a "bitchin’ tattoo cannot hide your inner desire to be Donald Trump."^[7]

Author and political commentator Victor Davis Hanson has written:

Yuppism... is not definable entirely by income or class. Rather, it is a late-20th-century cultural phenomenon of self-absorbed young professionals, earning good pay, enjoying the cultural attractions of sophisticated urban life and thought, and generally out of touch with, indeed antithetical to, most of the challenges and concerns of a far less well-off and more parochial Middle America. For the yuppie male a well-paying job in law, finance, academia, or consulting in a cultural hub, hip fashion, cool appearance, studied poise, elite education, proper recreation and fitness, and general proximity to liberal-thinking elites, especially of the more rarefied sort in the arts, are the mark of a real man.^[5]

Political leanings in the United States

A contradictory stereotype exists about yuppies that they are either more liberal than the blue-collar or more conservative than the urban poor. Yuppies greatly influenced both the Democratic and Republican parties, they usually register with a political party en masse when it is considered in style to affiliate with a certain political party (i.e. Republicans in the mid 1980s or late 1990s and Democrats in the early 1990s or late 2000s) and whichever president is successful in instituting economic policies, like Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Bill Clinton in the 1990s, that benefited the yuppie and upper-middle class. President Barack Obama has been described as an embodiment of yuppies by magazines such as The New Republic and the National Review due to his Ivy League educational background and urban professional lifestyle in Chicago prior to entering politics.^[8][9] Generally, yuppies (particularly in the East) have liberal positions on social issues, (such as drug control, prostitution, federal funding, censorship, abortion, & gay marriage), though conservative economic views (supportive of tax cuts & free trade).

History

Although the term yuppies had not appeared until the early 1980s, there was discussion about young urban professionals as early as 1968.

Critics believe that the demand for "instant executives" has led some young climbers to confuse change with growth. One New York consultant comments, "Many executives in their 20s and 30s have been so busy job-hopping that they've never developed their skills. They're apt to suffer a sudden loss of career impetus and go into a power stall."^[10]

Joseph Epstein was credited for coining the term in 1982.^[11], although this is contested and it is claimed that the first printed appearance of the word was in a May 1980 Chicago magazine article by Dan Rottenberg.^[12] The term gained currency in the United States in 1983 when syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Greene published a story about a business networking group founded in 1982 by the former radical leader Jerry Rubin, formerly of the Youth International Party (whose members were called yippies); Greene said he had heard people at the networking group (which met at Studio 54 to soft classical music) joke that Rubin had "gone from being a yippie to being a yuppie". The headline of Greene's story was From Yippie to Yuppie.^[13][14] The proliferation of the word was effected by the publication of The Yuppie Handbook in January 1983 (a tongue-in-cheek take on The Official Preppy Handbook^[15]), followed by Senator Gary Hart's 1984 candidacy as a "yuppie candidate" for President of the United States.^[3] The term was then used to describe a political demographic group of socially liberal but fiscally conservative voters favoring his candidacy.^[16] Newsweek magazine declared 1984 "The Year of the Yuppie", characterizing the salary range, occupations, and politics of yuppies as "demographically hazy".^[3]

In a 1985 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Theressa Kersten at SRI International described a "yuppie backlash" by people who fit the demographic profile yet express resentment of the label: "You're talking about a class of people who put off having families so they can make payments on the SAABs ... To be a Yuppie is to be a loathsome undesirable creature". Leo Shapiro, a market researcher in Chicago, responded, "Stereotyping always winds up being derogatory. It doesn't matter whether you are trying to advertise to farmers, Hispanics or Yuppies, no one likes to be neatly lumped into some group".^[3]

Later, the word lost most of its political connotations and, particularly after the 1987 stock market crash, gained the negative socio-economic connotations that it sports today. On April 8, 1991, Time magazine proclaimed the death of the yuppie in a mock obituary.^[17]

In the 1990s, most yuppies made a transition to the middle class but they maintain an upper-middle level lifestyle, as they age well to their 30's and 40's the "yuppie" generation often got married and settled down to have children. The economic boom at the time have transformed some yuppies or higher-income couples into Bobos or the "bohemian bourgeois".

The term has experienced a resurgence in usage during the 2000s and 2010s. In October 2000, David Brooks remarked in a Weekly Standard article that Benjamin Franklin- due to his extreme wealth, cosmopolitanism, and adventurous social life- is "Our Founding Yuppie".^[6] A recent article in Details proclaimed "The Return of the Yuppie", stating that "the yuppie of 1986 and the yuppie of 2006 are so similar as to be indistinguishable" and "[h]e’s a shape-shifter... he finds ways to reenter the American psyche."^[4] Victor Davis Hanson also recently wrote in National Review very critically of yuppies.^[5]

There has been publicized talk of the "Second Generation yuppie", affluent children grown to young adulthood entering the white collar workforce in the 2000s. However, due to the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, speculation that yuppies would finally vanish as a subculture has shown their volatile status or they will become part of American history of pop culture alike the cowboy, pioneer, hippie and GI soldier.

Yuppie subculture expansion

The Yuppie subculture of the early 1980's was once concentrated in urban centers like Chicago, the Eastern Seaboard (i.e. New England States) and West Coast of the United States. But the subculture has quickly expanded and migrated to the Southern United States and the interior Western United States in the decade. That was when White-collar and financial-based economies boomed in the Southeast and Southwest regions, esp. in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Colorado and Utah by the late 1990's. The rise of a yuppie subculture thrived in Canada during the Prime Minister Brian Mulroney era at the same time.

Usage outside of the United States

A September 2010 article in The Standard described the items on a typical Hong Kong resident's "yuppie wish list" based on a survey of 28 to 35 year olds. About 58% wanted to own their own home, 40% wanted to professionally invest, and 28% wanted to become a boss.^[18] A September 2010 article in the New York Times defined as a hallmark of Russian yuppie life adoption of yoga and other elements of Indian culture such as their clothes, food, and furniture.^[19]

The rise of the yuppie can be observed in developed nations such as Japan where the sarariman (Salary Man) took prominence in the 1980s and '90s, esp. the country has a yuppie culture to produced what was then the world's 3rd then second largest economy, and yuppie/upper-middle classes in white-collar careers throughout the western world.

In Mexico, the term "yupi" is a neologism for residents of metropolitan Mexico City known for having a modern white-collar economy. Yuppification has occurred in economic booming nations of China, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and South Africa in the late 1990's and 2000's.

In South America yuppie was used in the same way as the rest of the western world.

Notable cultural depictions of yuppies

• The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, a "satire of yuppie excess"^[20]
• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney^[21] (McInerney himself has been called "the archetypal yuppie")^[22]
• Family Ties, the TV show, features a young Michael J. Fox as the Republican coat-and-tie-wearing 'yuppie-in-the-making' Alex P. Keaton and his parents (played by Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney) as former hippies.^[23]
• Fight Club, the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel and 1999 film adaptation, follows "a disenchanted yuppie ... numbed by the sterile materialism of modern life."^[24]
• In John Carpenter's They Live, a pair of working class protagonists come into possession of sunglasses that reveal yuppies as predatory aliens.
• Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace, a short story about a young Republican after enjoying life after prep school with a group of punk rockers.^[25]
• Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz^[21] describes a later (early 1990s) evolution of the Yuppie, in which the upper tier made considerably more than the lower, supporting tier, the "slaves" of the title, who were trapped by rents and insufficient salaries into a struggle merely to stay afloat in Manhattan.
• American Psycho, the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel and 2000 film about yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman.^{[26][27][28][29][30][31][32]}
• thirtysomething, U.S. TV series, seen as a representation of "yuppie angst"^[33]
• Stuff White People Like, a satirical blog that pokes fun at generalizations and yuppie culture.^[34]
• Wall Street, the 1987 film about stock traders, has been described as "encapsulation of 80s yuppie greed culture", particularly Bud Fox, Charlie Sheen's naive 20-something character.^[35]
• "Yuppy Love", a 1989 Only Fools and Horses episode based on Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, in which Del Boy reinvents himself as a yuppy and hangs out in trendy wine bars.^[36]
• Christmas Vacation, a 1989 comedy, features neighbors Todd and Margo as the quintessential yuppies ^[37]
• Married with Children a Fox TV comedy sitcom (1987–97) featured the Bundy's neighbors: A couple led by twice married Marcy D'Arcy (her two husbands Steve Rhodes and Jefferson D'Arcy, are upwardly mobile men she's attracted to), a bipolar paleoliberal-neoconservative feminist banker who loathes their blue-collar neighbors and she bullies Al Bundy, a failed shoe salesman.
• Jeff Goldblum's character in 1983's The Big Chill is a quintessential yuppie who sold out his 1960s hippie ideals for money.
• The Last Days of Disco features male characters in the early 1980's who complain that they're referred to as yuppies.

Related terms

• Reporter David Brooks characterized yuppies as bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos, in his book Bobos in Paradise - the term became somewhat popular in the 2000s.
• A buppie is a black urban professional.^[38]
• A huppie is a Hispanic/Latino urban professional.
• DINKs (DINKY in the UK) is an acronym is for Dual Income, No Kids [Yet];^[39][40] at least one authority considers this to be synonymous with "yuppie".^[41]
• A scuppie is a Socially Conscious Upwardly-Mobile Person^[42][43]
• A winder is a young individual, uninhibited with regards to its own social success,^[44] and willing to comply only to a very soft (and versatile) set of moral standards.^[45]
• Yuppification often replaces the word gentrification; it is the act of making something, someone, or someplace appealing and thus marketable to yuppie tastes.^[46]
• Yuppie flu was a sometimes derisive, and inaccurate, term applied to chronic fatigue syndrome.^[47]
• Yuppie food stamp is a slang term in the United States for a $20 bill, because ATMs there typically dispense only $20 bills.
• Puppie is a poor urban professional (a.k.a. welfie and cheapie).
• YURP is a term describing the diverse group of young professionals who are dedicated to rebuilding New Orleans, and many low-income locals accuse them of "carpetbaggery".
• Yuppie Angst is when a yuppie experiences stress in pursuing a busy work schedule, anxiety attacks over minor fears or challenges, reckless driving on highways and overreacting in panic.
• Yuppiedom, a mockery of the term "kingdom" or a place of yuppies.
• Yuppie Values, also a mocking of core beliefs, trends and behavioral traits of yuppies as more of upper-income liberalism or an evolution of "Hippie values" about trying new or exotic things while pursuing a money-based life.

See also

• Capitalist
• Fads and trends
• Gold-collar worker
• Hipster
• Liberal Elite (a.k.a. Latte Liberal or Limousine liberal)
• Model minority
• Paninaro
• Selling out
• Sloane Ranger
• Trendsetter
• Young professional

References

External links

• Yuppies entry in the St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture