We're living in the world the yuppies made

Think from KERA

KERA

Kera, 071003, Think, Society & Culture, Krysboyd

4.7 • 911 Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2026

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

The 1980s brought us the young upstarts known as the Yuppies and you may be living their lifestyle today. Dylan Gottlieb is historian at Bentley University and co-host of Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast and author of “Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York.” He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the social and political changes Yuppies brought to not just urban settings, but throughout the country, why “self-optimization” is just a byproduct of their high-wage, long-hours lifestyles, and why their success came at the cost of equality. His companion article in The New York Times is “How Yuppies Changed America.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a question.
0:05.6	What happens if we refund tariffs?
0:08.6	Why are groceries so expensive?
0:11.2	At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious
0:14.4	because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see.
0:18.9	Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcast and start seeing
0:22.7	how the economy really works.
0:33.5	The term yuppie, which stands for young urban professional, became a thing in the 1980s as a new emphasis on inclusive enrollment at elite universities coincided with a lot of incredibly lucrative job opportunities for highly educated workers willing to take on punishing workloads in a finance sector newly liberated from regulation. These firms didn't gatekeep on the
0:56.5	basis of race or sex the way they had up through the mid-20th century. They pitched a version
1:01.5	of meritocracy, at least to anybody who could jump the hurdles of enrollment at Ivy League schools.
1:07.1	Even as just a small fraction of the American workforce could really claim the yuppie label,
1:12.6	they were highly visible in the culture, and in the past 40 years or so, they have changed it in radical ways.
1:18.6	From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.
1:22.6	Yuppies have unquestionably done well for themselves.
1:26.6	As my guest has discovered, their influence on the banking and tech sectors was just the beginning. It came at a high cost to economic, political, and even geographic equality. Dylan Gottlieb is a historian at Bentley University and co-host of Who Makes Sense, A History of Capitalism podcast, also author of the new book Yuppies,
1:46.4	The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gormons who conquered New York. Bill, and welcome to think.
1:52.3	Thanks so much for having me on today.
1:54.1	So obviously there were young urban professionals around in New York City and elsewhere
1:59.4	before anybody called them yuppies.
2:02.0	What does that label imply besides just holding a certain kind of job and living in a city?
2:09.3	Well, Yuppie is used initially as a signifier for the people who are, as you noted,
2:14.0	flooding into cities and increasing numbers in the late 70s and early 80s.
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