A new impulse book goes beyond preppinessWho are all those upwardlymobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floorsand $450,000 condos in semislum buildings? Yuppies, of course, forYoung Urban Professionals, and the one true guide to their carefullyhectic life-style is The Yuppie Handbook (Long Shadow Books; $4.95).Tongue firmly in chic, Authors Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartleytirelessly chronicle the ways of the Yuppie, along with itslesser-known subspecies the Guppie (Gay Urban Professional) and Puppie(Pregnant Urban Professional). Both writers are accredited Yups:Piesman, 32.
Not to be confused with or.' Yuppie' ( / ˈ j ʌ p i/; short for ' young urban professional' or ' young upwardly-mobile professional') is a term that was introduced in the early 1980s and is defined by the as an individual who is a 'member of a socio-economic group comprising young professional people working in cities.' CharacteristicsAuthor and has written: Yuppism. Is not definable entirely by income. Rather, it is a late-20th century cultural phenomenon of 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. For the yuppie male a well-paying job in tech, 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. Historywas credited for coining the term in 1982, although this is contested.
The first printed appearance of the word was in a May 1980 magazine article by Dan Rottenberg. The term gained currency in the in 1983 when syndicated newspaper columnist published a story about a business networking group founded in 1982 by the former radical leader, formerly of the (whose members were called '); Greene said he had heard people at the networking group (which met at to soft ) joke that Rubin had 'gone from being a yippie to being a yuppie'. The headline of Greene's story was From Yippie to Yuppie. Humorist Alice Kahn claimed to have coined the word in a 1983 column. This claim is disputed. The proliferation of the word was affected by the publication of The Yuppie Handbook in January 1983 (a take on ), followed by Senator 's 1984 candidacy as a 'yuppie candidate' for. The term was then used to describe a political demographic group of but voters favoring his candidacy.
Magazine declared 1984 'The Year of the Yuppie', characterizing the salary range, occupations, and politics of 'yuppies' as 'demographically hazy'. The alternative acronym yumpie, for young upwardly mobile professional, was also current in the 1980s but failed to catch on.In a 1985 issue of, Theressa Kersten at 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 in, responded, ' always winds up being derogatory. It doesn't matter whether you are trying to advertise to farmers, or Yuppies, no one likes to be neatly lumped into some group'.The word lost most of its political connotations and, particularly after the, gained the negative socio-economic connotations that it sports today. On April 8, 1991, magazine proclaimed the death of the 'yuppie' in a mock.The term has experienced a resurgence in usage during the 2000s and 2010s.
In October 2000, remarked in a article that – due to his extreme wealth, cosmopolitanism, and adventurous social life – is 'Our Founding Yuppie'. 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 that 'the yup' is 'a shape-shifter. He finds ways to reenter the American psyche.' Also recently wrote in National Review very critically of 'yuppies.'
Usage outside of the United States'Yuppie' was in common use in Britain from the early 1980s onwards and by 1987 had spawned subsidiary terms used in newspapers such as 'yuppiedom,' 'yuppification,' 'yuppify' and 'yuppie-bashing.' A September 2010 article in described the items on a typical 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, and 28% wanted to become a boss. A September 2010 article in the New York Times defined as a hallmark of 'yuppie life' adoption of and other elements of such as their, and furniture. See alsoReferences. Algeo, John (1991). Fifty Years Among the New Words: A Dictionary of Neologisms.
Cambridge University Press. 0-521-41377-X.
Childs, Peter; Storry, Mike, eds. 'Acronym Groups'. Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture. London: Routledge. Retrieved 2016-05-20.
(August 13, 2010). National Review.
Retrieved August 16, 2010. Ayto, John (2006). Movers And Shakers: A Chronology of Words That Shaped Our Age. Oxford University Press.
0-19-861452-7. Rottenberg, Dan (May 1980). 154ff. Budd, Leslie; Whimster, Sam (1992). Global Finance and Urban Living: A Study of Metropolitan Change. 0-415-07097-X.
Hadden-Guest, Anthony The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night New York:1997-William Morrow Page 116. Clarence Petersen. Retrieved 2013-04-22. Jorge, Trendy (2006-06-21). Retrieved 2013-04-22.
9 January 1984. Retrieved 4 February 2016. Burnett, John; Alan Bush. 'Profiling the Yuppies'.
Journal of Advertising Research. 26 (2): 27–35. Moore, Jonathan (1986).
Campaign for President: The Managers Look at '84. 26 March 1984.
Retrieved 4 February 2016. Shapiro, Walter (1991-04-08).
Retrieved 2007-04-28. (October 23, 2000). The Weekly Standard.
Retrieved August 21, 2010. Gordinier, Jeff. Retrieved August 15, 2010. Algeo, John; Algeo, Adele S. (30 July 1993), Fifty Years Among the New Words: A Dictionary of Neologisms 1941-1991, Cambridge University Press, p., 978-0-521-44971-7. Wong, Natalie (September 8, 2010).
Kishkovsky, Sophia (September 14, 2010). The New York Times.Further reading.
Lowy, Richard (June 1991). 'Yuppie Racism: Race Relations in the 1980s'. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. 21 (4): 445–464.External linksLook up in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
The term “yuppie” now feels so dated that it occasionally seems an entire social class has vanished. If the of the 1980s no longer embody affluence, what has come to replace them? Canadian foundation engineering manual 2006 pdf creator. “, briefly, as the label of choice for certain irritating would-be members of the bourgeoisie.
But while hipsters were, like the yuppies before them, young and urban-dwelling, they weren’t exactly professional. Often rumored to be living off their trust funds, they spent their time as layabout musicians or bike messengers, milling in coffee shops and craft cocktail bars. Yuppies, on the other hand, were seasoned careerists who owned yachts and luxury SUVs and talked in public about their stock portfolios. On its face, this approach to conscientious living may look like a rejection of the uninhibited greed associated with the ’80s.
But the new aspirational class shares more with its predecessors than it wants to admit. As populist surges in the United States and Europe make clear, rising economic inequality has made it more critical than ever to rethink and uproot the status quo.
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Yet, as Cowen and Currid-Halkett both find, for all the new elite’s well-intentioned consumption and subsequent self-assurance, they have no intention whatsoever of letting go of their status.According to Currid-Halkett, the aspirational class isn’t limited to billionaires. Rather, it includes people of varying income levels who share a belief in meritocracy and, consequently, desire to express their acquisition of knowledge. It encompasses both the well-off partner in the law firm and the liberal arts school graduate working as an unpaid publishing intern, so long as both know to consume the same organic farmers market berries, discuss the latest Rachel Maddow segment, and quote lines from the musical Hamilton. Exact cultural references may vary: In her book, Currid-Halkett names Serial as the aspirational class’s go-to podcast, while today we might easily. The point is that members of the aspirational class trade in the semi-secret handshake of knowing the “right” things to consume at a given time. THE SUM OF SMALL THINGS by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett Princeton University Press, 272 pp., $29.95While consumption has always served as a way to display one’s status, the style of consumption favored by the rich has changed significantly. On the eve of the twentieth century, the social critic Thorstein Veblen published, whom he called the “leisure class.” As owners of the means of production, they did not need to work for a living and displayed their high status through the conspicuous consumption of brazenly nonfunctional luxury goods.
The apparent uselessness of these purchases signaled their owners’ extravagant indolence. Women of the leisure class wore constricting corsets that did not permit a great deal of movement, let alone strenuous labor; their male counterparts often carried gratuitous canes that suggested a physical inability to work.Today, mass production and an abundance of cheap knockoffs have rendered conspicuous consumption unremarkable at best and gauche at worst.
If criticisms of conspicuous consumption were once rooted in anti-materialism or antipathy toward the rich, today they are more likely to carry undercurrents of sexism and racism. We have a clear idea, for example, of who is being maligned when social critics remark upon the tastelessness of seven-inch Louboutin platforms, or expensive rims on Cadillacs.
Consumption habits are also invoked to upbraid the poor for their bad budgeting, as when Representative Jason Chaffetz recently suggested that the uninsured would be able to buy health care if they didn’tNow that conspicuous consumption has lost its prestige, today’s elites express their status through inconspicuous consumption. Their understated expenditures signal that they are knowledgeable and moral—most often to other members of the same class. “Rich oligarchs and the middle class can both acquire ‘stuff,’ ” notes Currid-Halkett. But, for the aspirational class, it is members’ eagerness to acquire knowledge and to use this information to form socially and environmentally conscious values that sets them apart from everyone else—which is why a $2 heirloom tomato purchased from a farmers market is so symbolically weighty of aspirational class consumption and a white Range Rover is not.Even forms of inconspicuous consumption undertaken in one’s ostensible downtime (attending a SoulCycle class or ) can increase one’s cultural capital.
“How else can an individual seem informed (and intellectually productive) at a dinner party if he’s not spending free time doing things that make him seem smart and culturally aware?” asks Currid-Halkett.While a desire to buy organic root vegetables might seem innocuous enough, there is a disquieting side to inconspicuous consumption. Aspirational-class parents reproduce their class position for their children in ways that are even less visible, but far more significant and expensive, than dressing them in artisan-made organic cotton tees. They buy their kids boutique health care, take them on, and—most importantly—equip them with every educational advantage, from high-end preschools to SAT tutors to Ivy League tuition. In 2014, the top one percent spent 860 percent more than the national average on education.For the aspirational class, the moral consumerism of buying the heirloom tomato provides a handy cover for the fact that their inconspicuous consumption reinforces their own economic privilege. As a result, members of this elite often come to view their station in life as ethical and deserved, unaware of the ways in which their spending patterns exacerbate class stratification. “At the very least,” Currid-Halkett points out, “they do not see themselves to blame.”It is here that The Sum of Small Things dovetails with The Complacent Class, which sets out to indict a comparable mind-set of self-satisfaction. Among the causes of stagnation in America, Cowen contends, is the “Not in My Back Yard” attitude of affluent city-dwellers, who protest the construction of homeless shelters and methadone clinics in order to “preserve” their neighborhoods.
Like Currid-Halkett’s aspirational class, to which most of them belong, NIMBYers cluster in densely populated metropolitan areas. “Quite frankly,” writes Cowen, “those are parts of America where people feel very good about themselves.” THE COMPLACENT CLASS by Tyler Cowen Columbia University Press, 128 pp., $26.00But according to Cowen, complacency extends far beyond the urban elite. The great problem of our time, he believes, is that we’ve abandoned the spirit of restlessness that was once a central tenet of the American experiment. He points to sluggish rates of productivity, the decline of geographical and socioeconomic mobility, and the increase in segregation by income, education, and ideology each as symptoms of our collective inertia. Cowen’s titular class is, in fact, composed of several different classes—each of which, he argues, suffers from its own specific form of complacency.At the top there is the cosmopolitan, highly educated “privileged class,” who are mostly content with the status quo.
Next are “those who dig in,” the middle-class families struggling on the precipice of downward mobility in the face of spiraling costs for education, housing, and health care. Finally, there are “those who get stuck,” the working poor and the underclass—Americans who have been incarcerated or chronically unemployed or otherwise mired in poverty with no clear way out. In other words, the complacent class covers almost everyone. Indeed, Cowen argues, it is our complacency that unites us: “Despite the divergences in their situations,” he writes, these groups share “a certain level of social and emotional and indeed ideological acceptance—a presupposition—of slower change.”This is a stirring provocation, to be sure. Complacency, Cowen argues, explains almost everything about our national character: why we’ve become less likely to riot, why we aren’t as willing to move across the country for better work or lifestyle, why a majority now agrees that a chill-out, feel-good drug like marijuana ought to be legalized. Yet the very case studies he cites tend to contradict his own theory.
The Yuppie Handbook Pdf
Take Cowen’s chapter on why Americans no longer participate in large-scale riots. By his own account, it’s not that the down-and-out are less disposed to smash windows than they were in the 1960s. It’s that policing and crowd management techniques have evolved significantly over the past few decades. Authorities now employ a host of sophisticated approaches to prevent unrest from sparking, and to defuse it quickly when it does, requiring permits for protests, creating “,” and increasing surveillance of would-be troublemakers under the Patriot Act. When riots do break out—like the Ferguson uprising over the police shooting of Michael Brown—local officials often bring in sympathetic authority figures (and ) and organizations like Amnesty International to broker peace and prevent disorder from spreading further.Likewise, Cowen’s analysis of the reemergence of segregation reveals little about national complacency.
The Yuppie Handbook 1984 Super Bowl
As he shows, segregation by income and education in major metropolitan areas has increased dramatically over the past half-century, even at a time when few people would openly profess to want it. Historically, segregation has been the result of income inequality, sky-high rents, and discriminatory policies such as redlining.
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