As the 1960s came to an end and the Vietnam War withered to its foregone conclusion the ‘Hippies’, those radicalized college students who protested everything and everyone now faced a terrible reality; they had to get jobs and earn a living. Unlike their parents, who had normally lived a quiet life working for a single company and bought a home in the suburbs, they wanted something more exciting. They wanted a fast paced career where they could be a big success, and they wanted to move back into the cities where there were more and different kinds of people and just more things to do.
These ‘Baby Boomers’ would, in the decade of the 1980s create a new demographic called the ‘Young Urban Professionals’ or ‘Yuppies’. The new book by author Tom McGrath, ‘Triumph of the Yuppies’ details how during the 1980s this small percentage of the American population came to completely change our country, and not for the better. Now not every baby boomer became a yuppie, for the most part yuppies were the college educated boomers who used what they’d learned to transform the US economy from one based on manufacturing to one based on service and finance. As an example of how quickly this metamorphosis took place in 1960 there were only 4,500 Master’s degrees in Business Administration (MBAs) handed out by US colleges and Universities but by 1976 there were over fifty thousand every year and that number would continue to grow throughout the 1980s.
In ‘Triumph of the Yuppies’ author McGrath follows the lives of many of the participants in that transformation, people like Peter Ueberroth who organized the 1984 LA Olympics, Bruce Springsteen whose song ‘Born in the USA’ became an anthem for a generation or Marissa Piesman whose ‘the Yuppie Cookbook’ helped popularize the name. These are only a few of the dozens of people who are mentioned because of their influence on the decade.
Three individuals stand out however as examples of their time. Jerry Rubin the 60s radical who in the late 70s decided he wanted to be rich along with Michael Milken, the investment wizard who turned risky and low valued ‘Junk Bonds’ into a multi-billion dollar business. The third was Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric (GE) who kept his stockholders happy by squeezing every penny he could out of two of the most famous companies in the US, and in the process destroyed one and while leaving the other a shell of its former self.
It was these individuals, along with thousands of others who actually accomplished the ‘Reagan Revolution’ a revolution whose real architect was the economist Milton Friedman. With the relaxation of regulations on banking and other financial industries the brand new MBAs began a series of ‘Leveraged Buy Outs’ and ‘Hostile Take Overs’ all of which made money for those in on the deal.
Meanwhile, those who weren’t MBAs or Yuppies of one variety or another saw jobs being sent overseas to counties with lower wage workers. McGrath even quotes Walter Mondale’s acceptance speech in the 1984 Democratic Convention “To those companies that send our jobs overseas, my message is: We need those jobs here at home.” So all the while that the dealmakers were lining their pockets the gap between rich and poor continued to grow.
In their rush to make money as quickly as possible to keep shareholders happy the management at American companies cut back on long term investments in order to turn short term profits. One case in point is particularly tragic, RCA the leading US electronics manufacturer made the deliberate decision not to invest $200 million dollars in the technology and assembly lines necessary to build the new Video Cassette Recorders that everybody wanted. Instead RCA spent $1.2 billion buying a small financial bank so that management could show an immediate profit. That’s why today Sony and Sanyo and Panasonic own the household electronics industry while RCA no longer exists.
In ‘Triumph of the Yuppies’ author McGrath tells a hundred such stories, he relates the details of deals and mergers that, in hindsight, have led to many of the problems our country faces today. At the same time McGrath also reminds us of the culture of the 80s, the decade of excess. The fictional TV shows ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ are mentioned along with the early reality shows like ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’. Other aspects of yuppie life are mentioned as well such as the exercise craze that Jane Fonda made a bundle on and gourmet food. In all ‘Triumph of the Yuppies’ does a great job of bringing the 80s back to life.
And that’s the problem with ‘Triumph of the Yuppies’ it’s all tales with no context, no analysis. McGrath never manages to describe how the counter-culture of the 60s grew into the excesses of the 80s, and he never discusses what do we do now to try to fix our economy, our political system, our country. So while ‘Triumph of the Yuppies’ does detail where our country went wrong there are no solutions, no mention of a way forward.
Nevertheless, I do give ‘Triumph of the Yuppies’ a thump’s up because it is really entertaining. Time and time again you will find yourself smiling at the antics of the selfish, looking out for number one bastards who truly believed that ‘Greed is Good!’