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 resembling digital watches, BMW-shaped pillows and fits of armor.
McGrath even takes us again to a few of the authentic 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 Want for Wealth’
Pointedly, for our up to date period, McGrath supplies texture to the dire financial state of affairs 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 — virtually nihilistically —as a result of rampant double-digit inflation disincentivized saving or contemplating the long run.
A gluttonous want for wealth in the end led the yuppies to assist dissolve post-war political orthodoxies like company duty for its employees, progressive earnings tax on higher-wage earners and protections for unions and American jobs.
These led them to assist right-winger Ronald Reagan and his supply-side economics. Panaceas resembling tax cuts for the rich, shrinking of presidency applications, deregulation of business and deficit navy spending emerged as de rigueur Republican positions.
McGrath particulars the ruinous historic outcomes: The wealthy received richer, whereas everybody else floundered. Center-class manufacturing jobs have been shipped abroad as executives privileged shareholder worth and their very own compensation. Social applications have been slashed, harming working folks and the weak.
Huge Highs, Huge Lows
The yuppies, a minimum of for a time, received precisely what they needed. Wall Avenue 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 identical financial and social tensions are political flashpoints at this time shouldn’t be a shock, McGrath argues. Yuppies are actually accountable for the nation’s monetary, political and authorized establishments, their legacy a blueprint for a litany of up to date horrors.
These embody ever-increasing earnings disparity, a celebration of ruthlessness, punitive disregard for employees and the setting, a reckless worship of short-term acquire and an insatiable fetishization of manufacturers.
He even ties our up to date worship of venality, callousness, lying and flash to the foundational roots of that the majority ’80s of characters: Donald Trump.
McGrath focuses virtually 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 very miserable, a reminder of the havoc the boomer era has wrought — and can proceed to wreak, because it now plans to stay eternally. However the ebook additionally supplies a helpful reverse roadmap for reviving a extra humane existence.