In Yuppies, Dylan Gottlieb promises not only a “collective biography” of the young, urban professionals who flocked to New York City’s investment banks and corporate law firms in the late 1970s and 1980s, but “the first social history of financialization” (pp. 7, 5). He has delivered on both counts.

Following in the mold of Sven Beckert (The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 [2001]), Gottlieb offers a culturally rich portrait of elite class formation in the midst of a national economic transformation. Financialization, “the process that moved Wall Street to the center of American life,” beginning with the deregulation enacted by presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, created an employment boom in the financial services and related professional services industry (p. 2). As investment banks developed new financial products and law firms facilitated a wave of corporate restructurings, Ivy League graduates who once would have moved to cities like Detroit or Pittsburgh to work as managers at industrial corporations now came to Wall Street. Working as bankers, lawyers, consultants, and traders, these yuppies were “the very people doing the work of deindustrializing the country: amassing small fortunes chopping up, spinning off, merging, offshoring, or otherwise squeezing short-term value out of companies that had once offered meaningful security to their employees and other stakeholders” (p. 5). More than a synonym for the professional-managerial class, Gottlieb’s yuppies are specifically those who occupied its “commanding heights” (p. 10).

But more than an economic shift, financialization was a “social revolution” (p. 2). As economic security shifted from a right to a privilege—reserved for those with the skills to thrive in a postindustrial economy that “prized facility with information and technology above all else”—and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement began to crack open the old WASP boys club of the economic elite, yuppies internalized an “ideology of meritocracy” to justify their success (pp. 10, 13). While enduring grueling hours and fierce competition in the office, in their leisure time yuppies embraced hobbies like running, with its ethic of “relentless self-improvement,” or the refinement of “good taste” by scouring the hottest restaurants in the Zagat guide (pp. 11, 137). Seeking out newly built or renovated apartments in areas close to the Financial District or Midtown, like Manhattan’s Upper West Side or Hoboken, NJ, they didn’t think much of the less fortunate residents they displaced or—as detailed in the book’s most harrowing chapters—the landlord arson wave they fueled. Though mocked in popular culture, yuppies were “not just a stereotype,” but the “authors of a more unequal chapter in American life” (p. 17).

Written in an engaging prose, Yuppies is organized thematically, rather than chronologically, with chapters following the yuppies through their social world: college career centers, “sweatshop” law firms, gentrifying neighborhoods, “gourmet” food consumption, the New York Marathon, and the yuppie-courting, “new economy”-embracing presidential campaign of Colorado Democratic Senator Gary Hart in 1984. Gottlieb makes extensive use of periodicals, especially the culturally influential New York magazine, to document yuppies’ habits and sensibilities.

Historians of Wall Street will find much useful material in Gottlieb’s wide-ranging sources; his close reading of university archives, for example, details campus recruitment practices, and a plethora of original interviews provide an immersion into life in the Wall Street workplace. Gottlieb is particularly attentive to the way in which yuppies’ racial, ethnic, and gender identities shaped Wall Street, detailing, for example, how pioneering M&A law firm Skadden, Arps broke with the traditional country club atmosphere of white-shoe law firms by recruiting women and racial and ethnic minorities—and denying most associates a path to partnership.

But while Yuppies is one of several recent histories of financialization (see, for example, Sean Delehanty, Company Men: The Invention of Shareholder Value and the Splintering of the American Economy [2025]), it is more closely in dialogue with the growing historiography of postindustrial New York City. Like Kim Phillips-Fein (Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics [2018]), Gottlieb shows how City leaders, in the wake of the 1975 fiscal crisis, looked to high-earning professionals not just as a source of tax revenue, but “an opportunity to present a positive vision for the future of the city—a counternarrative to ubiquitous media stories of crime and disorder” (p. 178). The New York Marathon, with its “overwhelmingly young, fit, white, professional, and highly educated” runners, advertised to a national television audience a “well-functioning metropolis” that organizers hoped to call into being (p. 178). But Yuppies also challenges simplistic narratives of gentrification. Following Suleiman Osman (The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York [2011]), Gottlieb contrasts the middle-class “brownstoners” of the 1960s, who found “authenticity” and an escape from suburban conformity by refurbishing old housing stock in areas like Park Slope and Hoboken, with the later yuppie arrivals who eschewed long-term investment in their neighborhoods and often decamped to the suburbs when they married and had children. While many brownstoners joined working-class Black and Puerto Rican tenants protesting against eviction, yuppies insisted that there was nothing wrong with “offering something better for people who can afford it” (p. 97).

But Yuppies’ greatest contribution is in showing how a relatively small number of finance professionals in one city had such an outsized influence on the politics and culture of the nation as a whole. Alongside Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer (eds., Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals since the 1960s [2025]), Gottlieb points to the essential role of yuppies in the “neoliberal” wing of the Democratic Party, first led by Gary Hart and then institutionalized by Bill Clinton. But more than party politics, it was yuppies’ unapologetic embrace of a “constant project of self-improvement and upward mobility” that made them so well-suited to postindustrial society (p. 255). Just as financialization became “simply the way of the world,” the yuppie virtues—or vices—are now so ubiquitous as to be invisible (p. 267).