On the job, newly minted yuppies were also sold a particular story: Upward mobility was open to anyone with the right degree and the right work ethic. Take the experience of Nancy Lieberman. After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School in 1979, she was eventually hired by Skadden, an upstart law firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Soon she was logging 60-to-75-hour weeks working on multibillion-dollar deals. At Skadden, she believed that merit trumped gender. “I never thought to myself, ‘Poor me. I’m a woman, and I’m trying to make it in a man’s world,’” she said in a later podcast. “All they wanted was for you to be a really great lawyer.”
That dogged pursuit of the strenuous life extended from the workplace into yuppies’ leisure time. They developed a passion for road races like the New York City Marathon. This wasn’t the casual jogging that countercultural types had embraced in the late 1960s. It was distance running, and it required the same self-control and long-range planning that characterized yuppie careers. “Some races you fell flat on your face, some races you did great. It’s the same thing in the trading world,” the former bond trader Mr. Jen told me. “There are no excuses. You either perform or you go home.” Here are the seeds of the self-optimization culture that blossoms in our own era, in which fitness trackers and peptide stacks are dinner-party topics. For yuppies then as now, leisure is just another form of work.
The marathon also appealed to another key constituency: the city leaders, real estate moguls and corporate types who hoped to burnish New York’s image as it emerged from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. What could be a better advertisement than the marathon, whose participants were overwhelmingly white-collar professionals? In the 1980s, television broadcasts beamed images of yuppies running through the city’s boroughs to millions of spectators around the world. The marathon was just a harbinger. Inspired by the success of that experiment, New York decided to stake its future on yuppies: paying them, housing them and entertaining them. Decades later, cities remain their playgrounds — venues to splash their disposable income and demonstrate their class and taste.
The yuppies also helped forge our modern foodie culture: one that required wealth but also the cosmopolitanism to know that, say, balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes and Manchego cheese were foods worth savoring. The Zagat guide — created by two corporate lawyers in 1979 — helped educated professionals to demonstrate this expertise. (The guide was designed to fit in the pocket of a business suit jacket.) Grocery stores transformed themselves for yuppie tastes, too. Shopwell, a middle-class market with roots on the Lower East Side, rebranded dozens of its stores as the Food Emporium. The executive behind the idea, Glen Rosengarten, called his new concept “the Bloomingdale’s of supermarkets” — a high-end store for a well-heeled clientele. It joined a raft of other upscale markets, from the Silver Palate to E.A.T. to Dean & Deluca, that trained an entire generation on the pleasures of the gourmet life.
Yuppies also redrew our political map. They helped to shift the Democratic Party away from the unions, Black Americans and urban bosses of the New Deal coalition and toward the interests of metropolitan professionals. During the 1980s, a new generation of politicians and donors — people like Gary Hart, Chuck Schumer and Bruce Wasserstein — remade liberalism for the postindustrial era. The meritocratic ethos of the trading floor, they reasoned, should govern society at large. Innovation, not regulation or redistribution, would drive growth. And the sclerotic regulatory state was only hampering it. What was needed instead was a nimbler government that oversaw a technology-heavy economy, with yuppies at the vanguard.
