Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the Wall Street movie franchise. Photo: Screenshot
The generation that marched to ban the bomb had morphed into something much less idealistic by the early 1980s, a US writer says.
The Yuppie (young urban professional) embraced the creed of greed, designer jeans, inner-city living and their cultural impact lives on today, says Tom McGrath.
He writes about the choices Yuppies made 40 years ago about food, fashion and urban living in Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation.
In the late 1970s the US economy was starting to falter after two decades of steady growth, but Wall Street and the financial sector was booming, he told Afternoons.
"Yuppies were very much at the vanguard of embracing a harsher form of capitalism than we had seen in the previous couple of decades - this was very much about whatever it takes to improve the bottom line, whether that's a corporate bottom line or my own personal bottom line."
As this well-educated, white-collar cohort came to dominate the culture, traditional well-paid manufacturing jobs started to disappear, he said.
"Corporations and Wall Street are making these decisions that we can produce a product far more cheaply if we send the job somewhere else, other than to places where it typically had been produced in America.
"And that puts literally millions of Americans out of work, it disrupts communities. We still very much see that divide in America today, and I think its roots really go back to that to that period in the '80s."
The success-driven ethos extended into the broader culture, he said.
"When you get into the lifestyle realm, it's the idea that 'I'm going to be as successful as I possibly can be in every single aspect of my life'. So yes, I will have a successful career. But it also means I'm going to be successful in terms of staying physically fit. And so, there's a huge boom in the opening of gyms and fitness clubs in America... Yuppies are the one really driving that trend."
Food became a status symbol too, he said.
"There's this rejection of processed, mass-appeal food. And suddenly we're have a generation that's much more focused on high-end gourmet food with ingredients that might sound common to us now as sundried tomato, or a focus on olive oil. But back in the early '80s, those were things that were not all that common."
It was also the era that saw the rise of the big brands, he said.
"Some of this goes back to the designer jean craze in the 1970s - Calvin Klein jeans - and it was the first time that we saw this pretty utilitarian piece of clothing, a pair of jeans, suddenly it has a designer name on it, and that designer means a lot."
The gentrification of inner cities, he said, was also a Yuppie legacy.
"It goes back to that sophistication - they want the urban existence, and not the suburban upbringing that so many of them had. But they are then forcing out of working-class neighbourhoods, people that in some cases had been there for generations."
What was appealing about urban life started to disappear, McGrath said.
"The more that these white - overwhelmingly white - college-educated people embrace that lifestyle, the more the diversity actually disappears. It ends up being ironically almost as homogenous as the suburbs that many of them actually came from."
The Wall Street crash of 1987 may have stalled the rise of the Yuppie, but it was short-lived.
"There was a generation of young people working on Wall Street, Yuppies working on Wall Street, who had only seen the stock market more or less go up.
"Starting in 1982, the market for the most part went on a very long bull run. And so that's where you get this several-year period of money being thrown around all over the place, this sense of the times are gonna last forever."
When the crash came obituaries were written for the Yuppie, he said.
"Obviously tongue-in-cheek in that period, but there was a sense of, 'OK, that's over, that's behind us. We're going to return now to a more normal set of values.' I'm not quite sure that actually happened.
"Some of the flashiness may have been toned down after that. But first of all, economically, the stock market returned to its value, I think it took less than two years before it had climbed back up to where it was, and then it just kept going. And it's now worth 20 times what it was worth back in the late 1980s."
The Yuppies still walk among us, he said.
"There's a younger generation of Yuppies, people now in their 20s and 30s. Some of the outside things may be different, there's no longer this focus on wearing the power suit, with the right tie and so forth.
"And the lust for money isn't quite as vivid... in many ways they have as much cultural and economic clout as the Yuppies of the of the 1980s did. It just might look a little bit different than it did 40 years ago."
