Is your city shaped by yuppie taste?

Let me set the scene for you. Today, we're going way back to the 80s, when pop music drowned in synths, the volume of everyone's hair was set too loud, and yuppies were flooding New York City. Dylan, you wrote a book about yuppies. Could you explain what a yuppie is? Well, simply put, it's a young urban professional, and it's a media stereotype that identifies these new people who are on the scene in America's cities in the 1980s. But as I argue in my book, and we'll talk about today, they're actually quite real people who wash over cities like New York and utterly remake them. Thank you, first of all, for that description. That's very, very helpful. But for our younger listeners, or maybe people who somehow missed the yuppie wave back in the 80s, if you were around, think Patrick Mayweather. From American Psycho, or even Miranda Hobbs from Sex and the City. Nowadays, cities are so chock full of young urban professionals that it's not really abnormal, but this wasn't always the case. According to Dylan's book, Yuppies, the bankers, lawyers, joggers, and gourmands who conquered New York. New York City was the first link in a chain reaction of the reorganization of American cities to cater to yuppies. And it's not just cities that have changed. Yuppies completely changed. Yuppies completely changed our country's economy, its politics, and its culture, too. Foodie culture started with yuppies. Marathons, yuppies down. A neoliberal Democratic Party that distances itself from the New Deal-era politics it used to have. That's yuppies doing, too. So, to understand how we got to our current moment, I'm going back to the 80s with Dylan Gottlieb, author of Yuppies and assistant professor of history at Bentley University. Dylan, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Thanks so much for having me. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Let's just make sure that we're, like, really defining the terms here, because I feel like yuppie is a word that has gotten thrown around a lot over the decades. You talk about young urban professionals. What exactly do we mean by that? Like, is there a difference between yuppie and creative class, at least as you define it? Like, I am a young urban professional, but would I fit into the definition of a yuppie? So, things are fuzzy here, and I think it helps to slow down and think historically in specific moments. Because you use the term creative class, and it's a useful one. It's coined by this guy, Richard Florida, in the 2000s to talk about people like, well, you and me. Hosts of radio programs, podcasts, academics, graphic designers, who sit at laptops in fashionable cafes and seek out diverse cities and authentic neighborhoods to ply their craft, drink IPAs in the evening, and ride fixed-gear bicycles. And that's a specific moment in the 2000s. But they only enter the scene after the yuppies have remade American cities in an earlier era. So, who exactly am I talking about in this book? Well, they're specifically tied to a new sort of economy that emerges in the 1970s, where finance, in particular, takes center stage on the American scene. Like, no longer are profits in the economy going to be driven primarily, say, by manufacturing workers, by union workers. Like, stuff that gets made and that people buy and use. There you go. Or even the white-collar workers who managed those concerns. Well, that's going to be supplanted by finance at the very center of our economy. And, of course, the firms that work along with finance, the management consultants that are going to remake the corporations to boost their stock prices. Or the lawyers who are going to enact the merger. The manufacturers that get deals done, that extract value out of those old manufacturers. That is going to be the engine of American dynamism in the 80s and beyond. But in order to do all that, in order for finance to really produce profits, you need people. You need foot soldiers on the front lines to enact this new mode of profit-making. Day by day, deal by deal, contract by contract. And those are yuppies. They're actually created by this new demands of Wall Street, by big law. Looking to America's campuses and saying, hey, we need a lot of bodies on the line. And that's exactly who they find. And create a whole new class of people at the time called yuppies in a specific moment, really, in the 1980s. One of the things you mention in the book that really delineates yuppies as kind of separate from the creative class. Yuppies are basically the direct beneficiaries of this financialization that struck America. But you also mentioned that the yuppies are not really in the business of getting priced out in the same way that maybe. Creative class professionals might be. They're doing the pricing out, right? So creative class professionals have tons of cultural capital. You know, we might be expensively educated. We know the latest and greatest, whether it comes to food culture or visual art. Yuppies have all that, but they've also got lots of capital capital. They've got money to splash out on newly renovated co-op and condo apartments. They can utterly remake the retail landscape of a neighborhood with their demands for high-end boutiques or restaurants. They've got the cash to back up that ever-evolving taste culture in a way that people, we might call the precariat, the sort of downwardly mobile creative class, certainly don't. Like, I have not much left after childcare and rent to splash out on a restaurant meal, at least very often. I want to talk about what created the yuppie. Like, to understand the context, a lot of businesses and well-paid professionals left cities for the suburbs in the 50s and also the 60s. And, you know, we know that as white flight. So that's one of the reasons why. That's one of the reasons why yuppies weren't much of a thing for a while before the 70s or later 70s and the 80s. But then a lot of things changed in the finance and law sectors that brought young professional people back to New York in droves. Talk to me more about the specifics of financialization and what created this kind of perfect storm. Yeah. We don't want to bore your listeners too much with, like, getting deep in the weeds with deregulation. But it's a broad and bipartisan effort to find a new source of dynamic. Dynamic growth in the economy. You know, like, capitalism is in a crisis in the 1970s as America is experiencing rampant inflation. Manufacturing jobs are disappearing, at least from the Northeast. And they have been for decades. But that's accelerating. And they're being sent overseas. America's global competitiveness is waning. And the U.S. is looking for its own competitive advantage. And what does it have? Well, one of the things it has is an incredibly dynamic educational sector. It has the leading. Universities and colleges and the human capital, we might say, that they produce every year in the form of young people with smarts who can manipulate information, whether it's financial or legal, and produce huge amounts of potential advantage for the United States in industries like finance. So using new stores of capital, like pension funds and money market mutual funds, just big pots of money sitting around, the right financial thinkers realize you can create value or extract value out of these big, hulking corporations by creating new financial instruments and getting those young people working on them in vast numbers to extract and create value out of an economy that seems like it's slowing down. But, you know, it could be stripped for parts. And there's a lot of profit to be made by selling them off. I mean, I want to bring some stats into this that you've shared before. Like, you know, in 1979, only 1 in 30 seniors at the University of Pennsylvania headed to Wall Street. By 1987, it was 1 in 3 at Yale. 40%. The graduating class of 1985 applied to work at just one investment bank, First Boston. You know, you quoted one recruiter on Wall Street who said, in 1987, easily 50% of Wall Street is 35 or under. Like, I guess I hadn't really pictured what this looked like. But, I mean, you lay out in the book, and as it's described, right, like from people at the time, from these statistics that you shared, these colleges are supplying this growing workforce with these young, young, young people. That are doing this really intense work. That also, though, it pays a hell of a lot. It sure does. And so, this is a social revolution, financialization. It's not just boring charts watching, you know, profits rising. It's actually people making choices in a specific historical moment to say, get that money. And they're different than the people who came 20, 30 years before graduating from Princeton or Yale, as you mentioned. You know, in the 50s and 60s, it's white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men leaving these schools. You know, there are more jobs than there are graduates every year. I just want to pause that for a second and just really bear it on what you were talking about, like far in the past, like in the 1950s, you're saying, yes? Yeah. More jobs than there are graduates. Because it's a very artificially constrained white-collar job force. Like, you would not be in it. Like, you wouldn't have gone to Yale because it wasn't co-ed, right? Yeah. The civil rights movement had not yet shaken the very foundations of who gets to do this work in America. Yeah. The women's movement had not opened up. They hadn't opened up the professions, you know, however incompletely, to women. So, the 70s are this watershed moment when whole new populations are entering these universities. So, they're diversifying. At the very same time, Wall Street and these law firms need all these bodies on the floor to do the work. So, these things happen in tandem. And interestingly, this new group of students, you know, first it's white ethnics, it's Jews and Irish men, and then white women, and then a whiter caste. You could see the appeal of these high-paying jobs if you're the first person in your family. I'm going to go to college. Yeah. Or you come out with more debt than the WASPs of the 1950s. You might be forced or compelled to take a job at a big law firm to pay off your law school debt. But, like. according to your book, there was kind of like a devil's bargain that came with that. Like, sure, you know, women and minoritized people could get hired, but they had to be willing to work grueling hours in these industries. And many of these minoritized people welcomed the bargain, you know, and ended up seeing those who couldn't get to their level as having less merit. And this cemented an idea about America as a meritocracy. Can you say more about that? Yeah. So, it's interesting in the response to my book. I've had a lot of angry responses, let's just say, in the comment section from people who feel personally attacked for their choices in this era, making these precise choices. And I actually want to push back and say, I feel like I'm absolving a generation. Instead of pointing the finger and saying, like, you were morally wrong to take this, as you called it, a devil's bargain, you were sort of a victim of circumstance. I think that the incentive structure for young people changed profoundly. And the competitive. Competitiveness for jobs in a slower economy made it utterly different than the 1950s, when there were more jobs than graduates. Now you are duking it out against all your classmates, because all the banks are hiring students from every background. It's different from America's affluence at mid-century, when middle classness seemed assured. The 1980s aren't that way. You're competing with more people. And when you do claw your way to the top, you tell yourself or you're sold a story about your own excellence and merit and having gotten there. Why are you at the top of the social hierarchy? Well, it's not because of your connections. It's not because who your grandfather was. It's because you work the hardest. And this is something I heard over and over again in my interview subjects and in the archives. And I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is a remarkable accomplishment that women are 40% of graduating law students by the end of the 80s. The fact that people from all backgrounds can, some small number of them, reach at least the entry-level positions in these industries, that's amazing. And it's. Yeah. Yeah. It's a democratization of who gets to be at the top. The fact is, we still have an elite that's still extracting value from the rest of us, right? Like, they're putting those manufacturing workers out of work. They're voiding union contracts. The dictionary has to add a new term, downsizing, because companies are firing workers not because they're suffering, but because they want to boost their stock price to keep finance and Wall Street happy. So inequality is the general trend. But the elite that's benefiting from that, the very small slice that I write about, well, they're getting more diverse. And that diversity absolves them, or at least they think it does. It absolves them of that broader inequality. We're going to take a quick break. But first, if you're a longtime listener or brand new to It's Been a Minute, be sure to come back every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday for brand new episodes. And did you know you can make it even easier to get new episodes by hitting the follow or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app? Whether you're a new friend or a loyal bestie, join the team by subscribing today. Coming up after the break, people I interviewed still remember their finishing times from races in the early 80s. Sickos, right? Sickos, literally. Stick around. I want to talk a little bit more about how Wall Street was able to flourish. I mean, New York basically gave Wall Street and real estate like so much in tax breaks. To try to bring yuppies in. And it put funds toward marketing, you know, the city towards yuppies. What was the city's reasoning for that? Well, you do have to be sympathetic to New York's leaders in the mid-70s. The city is totally moribund. It's lost half a million jobs by the time its economy bottoms out. It's fully in fiscal crisis and nearing bankruptcy in the mid-70s. So you can understand why leaders casting about for a growth strategy look to the green shoots of renewal in certain neighborhoods. Where young, socially liberal people are moving, say the Upper West Side or Park Slope, where social workers and teachers are renovating brownstones with their own sweat equity and often family equity because they can't get mortgages in redline neighborhoods. And they think, huh, if we could only attract more of those people to the city, maybe we could trigger some type of revival by returning suburbanites back to the city, living here, investing in it, because we don't have any other options. We certainly don't have a vision of resurrecting our manufacturing economy. We're not really going to train the low-wage service economy here through things like free CUNY tuition, one of the things that's cut in the fiscal crisis. We're going to reorient ourselves towards tourists and the middle-class people and eventually the yuppies who can maybe revive this city. We're all out of options. The problem is it works too well, or at least they run into financialization, which is going to provide a firehose of capital as young urban professionals start demanding luxury, housing, as the firms that employ them start doubling and tripling their hiring targets. All of a sudden, New York meets this transformation in the broader global economy towards finance, and all these young people are going to start remaking neighborhoods, not just with their own family money, not just with their sweat equity on the weekends, but with developers looking to make a lot of money by putting up condo towers, by evicting existing working-class residents. All of a sudden, this revival strategy catches fire, and it works almost too well. We depend on these young strivers coming into cities and remaking them. That's not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if they're more diverse than those who came before. People are getting a crack at living in the city and remaking themselves. It's the supply side. It's how the housing is going to be, say, cleared to make way for them, where the violence comes in, where the tax credits come in to encourage violent displacement, where people look aside from the harassment, even violent arson that evicts tens of thousands of people across the New York City area. That didn't have to be the way we provided for the arrival of that demand side. And that's the thing. I want to talk about that. I mean, this ended up displacing a lot of people, even killing some of them. And I think that that's something that not a lot of people think about when they think about cities being remade. What did that look like, that kind of displacement, both in New York and in other cities that had the epi-inflexes? Because what we're discussing did not just happen in New York City. Yes. So we think about gentrification often in sort of bloodless, abstract terms, like, okay, rents are displacing people that can't keep up. We know this is happening, but displacement is almost metaphorical. They're not literally being displaced. They just can't afford it anymore. And they move, working class people move to the next neighborhood and the next one. But what I found was utterly shocking. I felt like I was in a movie, a slow-mo motion in the archives, actually in Hoboken, New Jersey, so just across the river from lower Manhattan, where all these yuppies are flooding in this period. I'd found them on the census. I'm like, what are they doing in this working class place? In the historical archives, I opened a folder labeled fires, and see dozens of yellowed newspaper clippings detailing intentional landlord arson fires in buildings filled with working class, mostly Latino residents who are enjoying rent control or stabilization. Their buildings are burned. Dozens die over the course of the late 70s and early 80s. And the contracts are clear. The buildings will be delivered vacant to developers, who then quickly will slap on a for-sale sign, convert them to condos, and price them at many multiples above what they were getting before. And yuppies snap them up, either unaware of or unconcerned about who had been there before. And this repeats. In the Upper West Side, these neighborhoods are remade through quite intentional displacement and violence. And it's not just New York. In Chicago on the north side, in Boston, in the Back Bay and South End, there's evidence of intentional arson fires, yet again in these neighborhoods that are gentrifying at the same moment. Fire and other forms of violent displacement are really effective tools for landlords. They're really hard cases to prosecute, and few, if ever, are able to prosecute them. And I think that's what I found. They're often chalked up to ethnic rivalries. That seems very convenient. But this is a broader pattern that we see in city after city, at the same moment as, say, the Reagan administration is pulling back on affordable housing and HUD money for cities. So what do these people do? Many of them end up in the unhoused population. Like, this is the same moment we create the problem of homelessness in American life. It wasn't a constant before. In the 1980s, this combination of violent gentrification for young professionals, as well as a pullback on supports from the federal, at the federal level for cities, creates a permanent unhoused population that's still prevalent in gentrified cities today. Cities make their own devil's bargain to revive themselves through yuppies. If they're going to hitch their fortunes to these new people, it's not a broad-based system of renewal. It's not an effort to bring. Social services. Exactly. Those are the things you cut to, say, devote money to tourism dollars or promotional events like the New York City Marathon or tax breaks for. Condos. Like, that's where the money gets redirected towards your out-of-work, ex-manufacturing employees. Well, what do you have to offer them? Low-wage jobs, non-unionized in the service sector, in the care sector. And they are a tough way to try and reach middle-class security. They're not going to provide the stolidity and the steady wages that, you know, people enjoyed 30, 40 years before. So that bargain, it creates an hourglass-shaped social structure in the city. You've got the yuppies at the top demanding restaurant meals, nail care, demanding child care. And at the bottom, often an increasingly immigrant service class providing those services, but at vanishingly small wages. Oh my gosh. You know, we're talking a lot about sort of the economics of how all this shakes out, but I want to talk a little bit about yuppie culture. Yes, let's do it. I mean, you theorize that in order to cope with the soul-crushing jobs and to cement their status at the top of the heap, yuppies consumed. Like, they bought cool stuff, they got hot bodies, they ate expensive meals, and they basically created foodie culture, how did yuppies change the way we think about food in America? yuppies are at their very core competitive by nature. That meritocratic impulse, that rat race they're running extends into other arenas of their life. And so consumption, food, something that's supposed to be pleasurable and sensuous and not necessarily competitive becomes for yuppies yet another way to demonstrate their superiority, their good taste that puts them at the very top of the social structure. So, you know, it's no accident in the 1980s when journalists or culture writers want to make fun of yuppies, it's always food at the center. You know, in Wall Street, Charlie Sheen, he's making sushi on his first date and that's like, ooh, this is strange, exotic, yuppie food. They're drinking Perrier. But what's interesting is elite food wasn't always this way. Like, again, take us back to the 50s and 60s wasp culture. The food was pretty bad. It was expensive. It was invariably French. But in order to be fancy, it meant like imported game meats in a tin from Germany. It wasn't delicious. It wasn't fresh. That's not exciting. But it was fancy because it was expensive. And you could gain status by consuming it conspicuously around other wasps, right? Well, then comes counterculture. And what do they teach us? They teach us that the local, the authentic, the organic actually has more flavor, but also potentially more status. If you recontextualize things that were sort of derided as too ethnic or, you know, too unvarnished in a new context, yuppies realize they can gain status from eating everything up and down the class ladder. So sure, they'll go out for French food one night. If it's well-reviewed in New York Magazine. But they'll also go to the little Mexican joint downtown that they heard about in the same issue of the magazine. They'll eat arugula that they bought at the Green Market that just opened in Union Square. You know, they're going to demonstrate their cosmopolitan good taste across the class spectrum. And this is familiar to us from foodie culture, right? It's not just high-end. It's high-low. It's like cultural fluency, kind of. Exactly. That's the mark of the meritocrat who's done well for themselves, who's been abroad maybe. And the clearest way to see this, the best representation is the Zagat Guide. Do you know what that is? Yes, I do. I knew what it was before I read the book, but I didn't really understand how deep it was until I read the book. It's a generational thing. Like, younger people have never heard of this, right? But one of them described it to me in a Q&A. It's like, is it kind of like Yelp, but in a book? And I'm like, oh, honey. Yes, though. It is, right? It's like numerical rankings provided by people who've answered a survey about restaurants. And it's founded by two corporate lawyers with a specific purpose, to quantify just how good all sorts of restaurants, first in New York and then elsewhere, are. So when you're taking a client out to dinner, you want to get the most social cred for taking them to the cool spot. You whip out the Zagat Guide, which is designed to fit in your little suit pocket or in your pocketbook of your business attire. You take it out and you take them to that dive in Tribeca or the steakhouse in Midtown. Either way, both of them are going to be anatomized in Zagat and ranked numerically. And of course, you mentioned American Psycho before. He pulls out his Zagat Guide when it's time to make a reservation. Yes, he had to best Paul Allen. He couldn't let them win. The other thing that was really surprising to me when reading this book is how deeply yuppies were intertwined with running. Why were yuppies so into running? What was that about? It's funny. I interviewed someone who was a runner in the 70s in New York, and he remembers in the mid-70s, and I think it was Brooklyn, he'd be running down the street jogging, practicing for his next race, and people would be like, are you okay? Why are you running? Where's the fire? It was totally foreign to see a young person running down the street. It was an emergency. And now today, it would be strange if you didn't see people wearing athleisure jogging down the street, right? And it's a real barometer for how gentrified a neighborhood is based on how many people are doing personal fitness out on the street. Well, this is another way that yuppies make leisure into its own form of work. Racing, in particular road racing, like the New York City Marathon, is not just a casual sort of countercultural getting loose jogging for your health and personal fulfillment and wellness. No, it's competitive and it's quantified. You have a finishing time. People I interviewed still remember their finishing times from races in the early 80s. Sickos, right? Clearly, I'm not a runner, but some of them said, I did deals around Central Park Reservoir jogging with clients. It had a social aspect as well. I did deals around Central Park Reservoir jogging with clients. It went out for brunch afterwards. It's a whole social world that's created around fitness. And yet again, it proves to yuppies, it satisfies that sense that I belong here at the top. I work hardest and I play the hardest. And so what seems utterly familiar now, like so familiar, it's strange to even think about it. It had a historical origin where it emerged, had to be created. And then places like New York have to fund these races and permit people to run through their parks in the evening and protect them with police. And cities like Pittsburgh, Miami, they actually go to the New York City Marathon organizers and say, can you help us organize a marathon too? We see it as a method of our own revival. It's a marketing strategy to link these young, beautiful people, as one banker calls them, to the cities that they're running through. It's a way of burnishing their image for a new era. It works both ways. I want to talk about one more really important aspect of this whole yuppie cultural revolution, as it were. Yuppies also completely changed the Democratic Party. I knew that the Democratic Party was going to change the Democratic Party. I knew that the Democratic Party's focus changed from social services and working class coalitions to a more neoliberal market-based approach. But I didn't realize it was yuppies that changed it. How did that happen? Yeah. Well, it's a generational story, in part, that the young people who come into political power in the 1970s and 1980s are themselves more diverse, more expensively educated than the, say, urban bosses of the 1950s and 60s. And the New Deal coalition, is still there, but it's under strain in the 1970s. And Democrats are looking to build a new base of power that looks a little bit more like these politicians who are streaming into Congress, who are beginning to run America's cities. So there's a reorientation as the economy shifts towards finance and professional employment in the party that seeks to represent workers. The imaginary of who they represent is no longer that dirt-streaked union worker, because either he's abandoning the party for the Republicans, or those jobs are leaving entirely and it's no longer a real power base to drive political power. Where is the power coming from? Where is economic growth coming from? It's through the dynamic new industries of tech and finance and white-collar employment. And so politicians like Chuck Schumer, a young House member who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, quickly realizes, where are you going to get donations to keep up? Well, Wall Street. And very quickly becomes one of the best, supported politicians, Republican or Democrat, in Congress with Wall Street dollars. It's a story that you see in the 1984 presidential primary, where someone like Gary Hart, who's himself a young lawyer, he directed McGovern's campaign in 72 that also tried to tap into this generational energy of new politics. He says, well, our future in this economy is not what he calls with smokestack industries. They're not growing. They're gone already. Our future lies in high tech. It lies in unshackling the banks. That's where our competitive advantage is. Now, he doesn't win the primary in 84. Mondale does, and he's crushed by Reagan. But he portends a new type of party orientation that comes into full flower with Bill Clinton. That's where we see that familiar deregulatory agenda really enacted as a source of growth and dynamism, and also an imaginary that puts the yuppie at the very center of governance. They are the main characters of the economy now. Forget those, constituencies that we relied on before, whether they're Black people or blue-collar white workers or Southern farmers. Like, those people are out. We've lost them. It's time to turn to the new constituency. You know, it's interesting reading about this young coalition who are like fed up with the Democratic establishment. It sounds very much like what's going on right now with the Democratic Party. But in the 80s and 90s, they wanted to throw out New Deal social services and bring in public-private partnerships. And now, Democratic-Socialist partnerships are going to grow. And now, politicians like, you know, New York Mayor Zohra Mamdani want to bring these New Deal programs back. Like, it's kind of interesting. There's a little flip-flop tension there. Yeah, well, for many people who are expensively educated with student debt, they are not attaining the yuppie status and security that was enjoyed in the 80s and 90s. Like, it's harder and harder to reach a middle-class lifestyle, to provide for your children, whether it's in daycare, whether it's in secondary and post-secondary care. So, for them, rather than seeing it as a meritocratic rat race that they can climb atop, they're looking for broader imaginary that can rethink the sort of social contract that we tore up in this era in favor of yuppies and their upward climb. Like, if you're a member of the precariat, you don't see yourself climbing up to the top of the ladder. You want it to sort of, like, lower the slope for everyone and make it a little bit fairer in ways that are more familiar from an earlier era. You know, as I said in the beginning, and as you wrote about it, in your book, yuppies are so ubiquitous and have been for so long, like, in American cities. Like, their presence kind of stopped being newsworthy. But you wanted to write a whole book about their story. What do you see in the yuppie story that's worth us thinking about now? Well, there's so much. I mean, in some sense, they've become so ubiquitous that we've lost a name for these people. But I think we need a term for this class that is not the very top. These aren't the billionaires, right? But they're just underneath them, right? They're the handmaidens, though, to these plutocrats that are enacting this new system upon all the rest of us. And they're enjoying some of the spoils, not as much as the very top, but a lot of it. And I think that these people should, well, I think we need to change the incentive structure. So not every young person who leaves a top school is sucked inexorably into management consulting or finance. I think that AI might hasten that change for those people themselves. If they are sensing a sense of vulnerability in their positions, they're being replaced. There might be a real reorientation of the professional class towards a social democratic set of policies. And I think you see the glimmers of that with Zoran Mamdani's coalition, the downwardly mobile section of yuppies, the ones who can't make it, who think the city's unaffordable. They realize that maybe they have more in common politically with, say, the immigrant strivers on the way up, rather than with the plutocrats, the Bloomberg et al. in the city who want to make this a luxury city, as Bloomberg called it in the 2000s, for the very elite. But not for the rest of us. So there's some hope there, right? Like if this class can be aware of itself, and we can all point the finger at yuppies and say, this is something that needs to change, perhaps, just perhaps, we can do it. I really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed your book. This was so great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. This was a delight. That was Dylan Gottlieb, Assistant Professor of History at Bentley University. His new book, Yuppies, is out now. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by Nina Patuk. Our supervising producer is Cher Vincent. Our executive producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right, that's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.