Death of the Yuppie Dream?

Young Urban Professional.

That's what the acronym Yuppie stands for. And it was never a term of endearment.

For all of its symbolic value as an avatar for the men - and, notably, women -  who boldly, some might say cynically, shed their long hair and beads to garner business, law and medical degrees, then take the expanding 1970s and 80s workplace by storm, there was always resentment at the educational attainments, the fancy salaries (by the standards of their parents and grandparents), the unfettered urban lifestyle. And there was also an undertone of smarmy self-interest. A sense that there were no standards or values that could not be thrown over if the price was right.

And the beat went on for over a generation, let's call it 1975 to 2007, when the accumulated weight of all that self-aggrandizement collapsed like the paper foundation on which it was built.

A professional managerial class of 'symbolic analysts' as one observer called them, trained to manipulate numbers, words, ideas, concepts, documents, proposals and the rest of the ephemera on which the contemporary economy came to rest. Not too many John Henrys swinging 9 pound hammers in this crowd. But for the first time in history, plenty of women with degrees and determination to match.

Change the world, they did. But whether it is a better place is open to debate. More to the point, as the following article explains, they engineered their own obsolescence. Exorbitant compensation packages, the imperial CEO, the brand called me. In the end, there was simply not enough in the till to satisfy all of the demands. JPMorgan announces 17,000 job cuts and it barely elicits commentary. Layoffs of the elegantly suited and educated no longer attract much notice. Machines and well trained individuals working for one-tenth the money make perfectly serviceable substitutes. Which may be the signal that an era is passing and a new - if not better or brighter one - is upon us. JL

Barbara and John Ehrenreich comment in Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung NYC:

In the 1970s, this class seemed ascendant. An increasing percentage of the workforce held professional jobs, and many members of the PMC had found a distinct political voice
Saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, unemployed or working part-time for not much more than minimum wage: the struggling recent college graduate has—thanks to Occupy Wall Street—become a new iconic figure on the American cultural landscape. To many it seems that an implicit promise has been broken: work hard, get an education and you will ascend to the middle class.
Middle class is a famously flexible term in the United States, but here it seems to mean something close to what Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich first labeled the “professional-managerial class” (PMC) in 1977. This class of college-educated professionals is distinct from— and often at odds with—both the traditional working class and the old middle class of small business owners, not to mention wealthy business owners. Organized into largely autonomous professions defined by specialized knowledge and ethical standards, members of the PMC at times—from the Progressive Era to the New Left—were instrumental in mobilizing for progressive causes.
Today, the PMC as a distinct class seems to be endangered. At the top end, exorbitant compensation and bonuses have turned managers into corporate owners. At the bottom, journalists have been laid off, recent PhDs have gone to work as part-time, temporary adjuncts rather than tenure-track professors, and those now iconic recent graduates have taken to the streets. In the middle, lawyers and doctors are more and more likely to work for corporations rather than in private practices. Once independent professionals, they are now employees.
In this study, Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich deploy an all-too-rare example of class analysis as they revisit the concept of the professional-managerial class. Against the background of this new class’ historical evolution since the late 19^th century and its rise in the 20^th, the authors focus on the more recent development of the PMC.
Since 1980, however, things have looked less rosy. As capital attacked the autonomy of the liberal professions, the rightwing media tapped into working-class resentment of the “liberal elite.” More recently, while college educated workers, despite the impact of the Great Recession, have continued to do relatively well as a demographic category, the PMC as a class capable of acting in its own interest seems to be an increasingly irrelevant product of the 20^th century.
Historically, members of the PMC have designed and managed capital’s systems of social control, oftentimes treating working-class people with a mixture of paternalism and hostility. As advocates for rational management of the workplace and society, however, the PMC has sometimes also acted as a buffer against the profit motive as the sole meaningful force in society. Today, members of the PMC face a choice. Will they cling to an elitist conception of their own superiority and attempt to defend their own increasingly tenuous privileges, or will they act in solidarity with other working people and help craft a politics capable of creating a better world for all?