Class Dismissed

Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York by Dylan Gottlieb (Harvard University Press, 2026)

Reviewed by Joel Harold Tannenbaum

"The reason you are disappointed with your life is because life will always fall short of your expectations"

-Yuppicide, "Sound Advice," 1992

“Do yuppies even exist?” asks Des McGrath, anti-hero of Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco. “No one ever says ‘I’m a yuppie.’ It’s always the other guy who’s a yuppie.” In Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, historian Dylan Gottlieb makes an admirable effort to answer the question of who “yuppies” were, and why it still matters. The results are readable, insightful, harrowing, and, at times,  funny. Yuppies’ eponymous subjects work grueling hours in fiercely competitive environments, taking what little free time they have to dine, drink, and jog their way across Manhattan and certain parts of Brooklyn. Pleasures abound but, in Gottlieb’s telling, satisfaction remains just out of reach. The cultural and economic forces that summoned them are given due attention, as are the outsized impacts that the presence of “yuppies” had upon New York City itself. 

Yuppies promises at the outset a “social history of financialization” and “collective biography of a new professional class that came of age in an era of zero-sum competition.” Truth be told, what it delivers is more like the cultural history of a particular set of ideas about gentrification–the fraught word we assign to urban renewal projects that appear to favor the wealthy. 

Key to Yuppies’ cultural-historical project is something the French have a name for but the anglophone world does not: “Les trentes glorieuses”--the three decades of economic consensus following the Second World War in which, throughout the industrialized world, the working classes prospered and the middle classes grew. Yuppies begins with a particular spin on this narrative: This system began to teeter in the 1970s and the forces of greed rushed  in to capitalize on the entropy.  Manufacturing jobs moved abroad, top tax bands were reduced, and the stage was set for the pronounced wealth inequality of the present. 

For a long time, this was an obscure narrative, championed by lonely voices like Thomas Frank in the Baffler but finding little purchase in the mainstream. All that changed with the 2008 financial crisis. First the Occupy movement, then the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, popularized this particular deindustrialization narrative. Now, in 2026, it has gained considerable popularity on the right. The iniquities of global trade and the perfidy of billionaires are now a matter of broad, bipartisan consensus. 

Yuppies begins its story at the end of America’s “glorious thirty.” It’s the 1970s. New York, like America, is losing its industrial base. Inflation is up. Employment is down. Housing markets are stagnating. Crime is increasing. The era of working class prosperity is grinding to a halt. The powers that be decide that the path forward is for America’s economy to shift from manufacturing to financial services. But the investment banks–clubby, complacent WASP enclaves– and the law firms that service them, are simply not up to the task. Enter the “yuppies:”: young, high achieving, ambitious graduates of Ivy League schools. Catholics and Jews are welcome. Black and Asian Americans are as well, although they are rarer and face lower ceilings. The same goes for women, whose numbers increase as the 70s give way to the 80s. 

The liberalization of financial markets made all of the above  possible, and Gottlieb does a terrific job of explaining how that all worked. But for these new entrants to the Wall Street game, growth was a double- edged sword. As the proverbial “reserve army of labor” they faced fiercer competition and worked more grueling hours than their white-shoed predecessors.  

And therein lies the problem with Yuppies. Its author vacillates between treating its subjects as wage workers (albeit privileged ones) in a precarious industry, and invaders with fatuous tastes, to be ridiculed. A chapter on jogging and the New York City Marathon is titled “Rat Race.” Another chapter, on dining habits, derides a “countercultural fetish for local agriculture.” Apparently Yuppies’ working class sympathies do not extend to the farmers of the Hudson Valley! When a veteran bond trader who is Chinese American tells Gottlieb “I can’t say there was a racial barrier at all,”, the author is openly dismissive of this “modestly colorblind narrative.” It all begins to feel like the  “enormous condescension of posterity” that E.P. Thompson spoke of. Yuppies commands an enormous range of cultural information and deploys it succinctly, and yet is frequently undermined by its underlying contempt for its subjects. 

Perhaps that is deliberate. Yuppies is written for a wide audience and it does not purport to be otherwise. Its engagements with urban histories, labor histories, and histories of finance are largely confined to the endnotes. No problem there, of course. Without popular histories there would only be unpopular histories. But readers lured in by the promised “social history of financialization” may be disappointed. Readers who dislike the politics of ad hominem contempt may be disconcerted. Readers who wish to immerse themselves in sights and sounds of 1980s New York, however, will find in Gottlieb a knowledgeable and witty tour guide.

Joel Harold Tannenbaum chairs the Humanities Department at Community College of Philadelphia. He occasionally finds time to write about the history of food and food science in journals like Gastronomica and Petit Propos Culinaires.