David Brooks - Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

The New Upper Class and How They Got There

David Brooks

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This Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition 2004 Bobos in Paradise

Praise for Bobos in Paradise

An absolute sparkler of a book, which should establish David Brooksnot that he needs establishingas the smart, fun-to-read social critic of his generation.

Christopher Buckley

In his briskly written, clever Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks astutely describes a new-ish American elite. An enormously accomplished and perceptive reporter.

Benjamin Schwarz, Los Angeles Times

David Brooks has written a smart, funny book about the new meritocracy, the information-age elite whose members set the tone of our time.

Diane White, The Boston Globe

A mixture of heartfelt fondness and dead-on ridicule, animated by an energetic glass-half-full ambivalence. The book is a pleasure, simultaneously bracing and comforting.

Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review

A breezy, well-argued explanation for why affluent, well-educated people crave sub-zero refrigerators. Clever observations and gentle fun.

Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

As both comedy and sociology, Bobos in Paradise succeeds nicely. A terrifically entertaining read, it is fundamentally correct in its premise.

Alan Wolfe, The New Republic

Insightful and entertaining. The book abounds in perfectly rendered vignettes about the folkways of the educated class of the 1990s, a number of them laugh-out-loud funny.

Gary Rosen, Commentary

Written with compelling insight, extraordinary felicitous language, cunning wit, and great affection . Explains numerous paradoxes of the late 20th and embryonic 21st centuries.

Carlo Wolff, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

A serious social critic wittily dissects an American elite that blends Woodstock hedonism with corporate values.

Chris Waddington, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

A thoroughly entertaining shellacking of our most upwardly mobile friends and neighbors.

Arthur McMaster, The Tampa Tribune

Erudite and readable. Delivers densely packed cultural history and observation sprinkled with gut-busting passages. Brookss eye is superb.

Frank Bentayou, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

I tried to resist Bobos in Paradise but once I started, I was reading big chunks of it out loud to passersby.

Marta Salij, Detroit Free Press

TO JANE

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Copyright 2000 by David Brooks

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This Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition 2004

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Designed by Edith Fowler

Manufactured in the United States of America

20 19 18 17

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Brooks, David [date].

Bobos in paradise: the new upper class and how they got there / David Brooks.

p.cm.

Includes index.

1. Elite (Social sciences)United States. 2. Upper classUnited States 3. United StatesSocial conditions1980- 4. United StatesSocial life and customs1971- I. Title.

HN90.E4 B76 2000

305.520973dc21 99-88094

ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85377-2

ISBN-10: 0-684-85377-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85378-9 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-684-85378-7 (Pbk)

eISBN-13: 978-1-416-56173-6

THIS BOOK started with a series of observations. After four and a half years abroad, I returned to the United States with fresh eyes and was confronted by a series of peculiar juxtapositions. WASPy upscale suburbs were suddenly dotted with arty coffeehouses where people drank little European coffees and listened to alternative music. Meanwhile, the bohemian downtown neighborhoods were packed with multimillion-dollar lofts and those upscale gardening stores where you can buy a faux-authentic trowel for $35.99. Suddenly massive corporations like Microsoft and the Gap were on the scene, citing Gandhi and Jack Kerouac in their advertisements. And the status rules seemed to be turned upside down. Hip lawyers were wearing those teeny tiny steel-framed glasses because now it was apparently more prestigious to look like Franz Kafka than Paul Newman.

The thing that struck me as oddest was the way the old categories no longer made sense. Throughout the twentieth century its been pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations, lived in suburbs, and went to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention. They were the artists and the intellectualsthe hippies and the Beats. In the old schema the bohemians championed the values of the radical 1960s and the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s.

But I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasnt just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated peoples attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder to separate the antiestablishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man. Most people, at least among the college-educated set, seemed to have rebel attitudes and social-climbing attitudes all scrambled together. Defying expectations and maybe logic, people seemed to have combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos.

After a lot of further reporting and reading, it became clear that what I was observing is a cultural consequence of the information age. In this era ideas and knowledge are at least as vital to economic success as natural resources and finance capital. The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money, and new phrases that combine the two, such as intellectual capital and the culture industry, come into vogue. So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians. Or, to take the first two letters of each word, they are Bobos.

These Bobos define our age. They are the new establishment. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we all breathe. Their status codes now govern social life. Their moral codes give structure to our personal lives. When I use the word establishment, it sounds sinister and elitist. Let me say first, Im a member of this class, as, I suspect, are most readers of this book. Were not so bad. All societies have elites, and our educated elite is a lot more enlightened than some of the older elites, which were based on blood or wealth or military valor. Wherever we educated elites settle, we make life more interesting, diverse, and edifying.