In which is described the emergence of a new and distinctive culture among a highly influential segment of American society.
ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1987, ABC premiered an hour-long dramatic series with the cryptic title thirtysomething. The opening scene is set in a bar. Not a Cheers bar, where Cliff the mailman perches on a bar stool alongside Norm the accountant and Frasier the psychiatrist, but an airy room, perhaps attached to a restaurant, with sunlight streaming in through paned windows onto off-white walls.
The room is crowded with an upscale clientele gathered for drinks after work, nattily uniformed servers moving among them. Two women in their late twenties or early thirties wearing tailored business outfits are seated at a table. A vase with a minimalist arrangement of irises and forsythia is visible in the background. On the table in front of the women are their drinks—both of them wine, served in classic long-stemmed glasses. Nary a peanut or a pretzel is in sight. One of the women is talking about a man she has started dating. He is attractive, funny, good in bed, she says, but there’s a problem: He wears polyester shirts. “Am I allowed to have a relationship with someone who wears polyester shirts?” she asks.
She is Hope Murdoch, the female protagonist. She ends up marrying the man who wore the polyester shirts, who is sartorially correct by the time we see him. Hope went to Princeton. She is a writer who put a promising career on hold when she had a baby. He is Michael Steadman, one of two partners in a fledgling advertising agency in Philadelphia. He went to the University of Pennsylvania (the Ivy League one). Hope and Michael live with their seven-month-old daughter in an apartment with high ceilings, old-fashioned woodwork, and etched-glass windows. Grad-school-like bookcases are untidily crammed with books. An Art Deco poster is on the wall. A Native American blanket is draped over the top of the sofa.
In the remaining forty-five minutes, we get dialogue that includes a reference to left brain/right brain differences and an exchange about evolutionary sexual selection that begins, “You’ve got a bunch of Australopithecines out on the savanna, right?” The Steadmans buy a $278 baby stroller (1987 dollars). Michael shops for new backpacking gear at a high-end outdoors store, probably REI. No one wears suits at the office. Michael’s best friend is a professor at Haverford. Hope breast-feeds her baby in a fashionable restaurant. Hope can’t find a babysitter. Three of the four candidates she interviews are too stupid to be left with her child and the other is too Teutonic. Hope refuses to spend a night away from the baby (“I have to be available to her all the time”). Michael drives a car so cool that I couldn’t identify the make. All this, in just the first episode.
The culture depicted in thirtysomething had no precedent, with its characters who were educated at elite schools, who discussed intellectually esoteric subjects, and whose sex lives were emotionally complicated and therefore needed to be talked about. The male leads in thirtysomething were on their way up through flair and creativity, not by being organization men. The female leads were conflicted about motherhood and yet obsessively devoted to being state-of-the-art moms. The characters all possessed a sensibility that shuddered equally at Fords and Cadillacs, ranch homes in the suburbs and ponderous mansions, Budweiser and Chivas Regal.
In the years to come, America would get other glimpses of this culture in Mad About You, Ally McBeal, Frasier, and The West Wing, among others, but no show ever focused with the same laser intensity on the culture that thirtysomething depicted—understandably, because the people who live in that culture do not make up much of the audience for network television series, and those who are the core demographic for network television series are not particularly fond of the culture that thirtysomething portrayed. It was the emerging culture of the new upper class.
Let us once again return to November 21, 1963, and try to find its counterpart.
Two conditions have to be met before a subculture can spring up within a mainstream culture. First, a sufficient number of people have to possess a distinctive set of tastes and preferences. Second, they have to be able to get together and form a critical mass large enough to shape the local scene. The Amish have managed to do it by achieving local dominance in selected rural areas. In 1963, other kinds of subcultures also existed in parts of the country. Then as now, America’s major cities had distinctive urban styles, and so did regions such as Southern California, the Midwest, and the South. But in 1963 there was still no critical mass of the people who would later be called symbolic analysts, the educated class, the creative class, or the cognitive elite.
In the first place, not enough people had college educations to form a critical mass of people with the distinctive tastes and preferences fostered by advanced education. In the American adult population as a whole, just 8 percent had college degrees. Even in neighborhoods filled with managers and professionals, people with college degrees were a minority—just 32 percent of people in those jobs had college degrees in 1963. Only a dozen census tracts in the entire nation had adult populations in which more than 50 percent of the adults had college degrees, and all of them were on or near college campuses.1
In the second place, affluence in 1963 meant enough money to afford a somewhat higher standard of living than other people, not a markedly different lifestyle. In 1963, the median family income of people working in managerial occupations and the professions was only about $62,000 (2010 dollars, as are all dollar figures from now on). Fewer than 8 percent of American families in 1963 had incomes of $100,000 or more, and fewer than 1 percent had incomes of $200,000 or more.
This compressed income distribution was reflected in the residential landscape. In 1963, great mansions were something most Americans saw in the movies, not in person. Only the richest suburbs of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles had entire neighborhoods consisting of mansions. The nature of the change since then can be seen by driving around suburban neighborhoods where the affluent of the 1960s lived, such as Chevy Chase, Maryland; Belmont, Massachusetts; or Shaker Heights, Ohio. Most of the housing stock remaining from that era looks nothing like the 15,000- and 20,000-square-foot homes built in affluent suburbs over the last few decades. No reproductions of French châteaux. No tennis courts. No three-story cathedral ceilings. Nor were the prices astronomically higher than the prices of middle-class homes. The average price of all new homes built in 1963 was $129,000.2 The average price of homes in Chevy Chase offered for sale in the classified ads of the Washington Post on the Sunday preceding November 21, 1963, was $272,000, and the most expensive was $567,000. To put it another way, you could live in a typical house in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the nation for about twice the average cost of all houses built that year nationwide.
There was a difference between the houses of the upper-middle class and of those who were merely in the middle class. An upper-middle-class home might have four bedrooms instead of two or three, two bathrooms and a powder room instead of one bathroom, and two floors instead of one. It might have a two-car garage, maybe a rec room for the kids and a study for Dad. But it seldom bore any resemblance to a mansion. For an example of elite housing in 1963, download an episode of Mad Men that shows the Drapers’ suburban home—that’s the kind of house that the creative director of a major New York advertising agency might well have lived in.
The members of the upper-middle-class elite did not have many options for distinguishing themselves by the cars they drove. You could find a few Mercedeses and Jaguars in major cities, but even there they were a pain to keep up, because it was so hard to get spare parts and find a mechanic who could service them. Another factor was at work, too: Executives and professionals in 1963, especially outside New York and Los Angeles, were self-conscious about being seen as show-offs. Many people in the upper-middle class who could have afforded them didn’t drive Cadillacs because they were too ostentatious.
Another reason that the lifestyle of the upper-middle class was not dramatically different from that of the middle class was that people who were not wealthy could get access to the top of the line for a lot less in 1963 than in 2010, in the same way that you could live in Chevy Chase for not that much more than you would pay for a house anywhere else. It seems paradoxical from the perspective of 2010. Day-to-day life wasn’t cheaper then than it is now. In Washington newspaper advertisements for November 1963, gas was cheaper, at the equivalent of $2.16 per gallon, but a dozen eggs were $3.92, a gallon of milk $3.49, chicken $2.06 a pound, and a sirloin steak $6.80 a pound. The best-selling 1963 Chevy Impala cost about $26,600. At Blum’s restaurant in San Francisco, not an expensive restaurant, you paid $12.46 for the hot turkey sandwich, $13.17 for the chef’s salad, and $5.34 for the hot fudge sundae.3 Pearson’s liquor store in Washington, DC, had started a wine sale two days earlier, advertising its everyday wines at prices from about $6 to $12. All of these prices would have looked familiar, in some cases a little expensive, to a consumer in 2010.
But the most expensive wasn’t necessarily out of reach of the middle class. In 1963, one of the most expensive restaurants in Washington was the newly opened Sans Souci, just a block from the White House and a great favorite of the Kennedy administration. The Washington Post’s restaurant critic had a meal of endive salad, poached turbot, chocolate mousse, and coffee for a total of $44.91. The image of a luxury car to Americans in 1963 was a Cadillac. Its most expensive model, the Eldorado Biarritz, listed at $47,000. That same Pearson’s advertisement selling vin ordinaire for $6 to $12 offered all the first-growth Bordeaux from the legendary 1959 vintage for about $50 a bottle (yes, I’m still using 2010 dollars).
And so there just wasn’t that much difference between the lifestyle of a highly influential attorney or senior executive of a corporation and people who were several rungs down the ladder. Upper-middle-class men in 1963 drank Jack Daniel’s instead of Jim Beam in their highballs and drove Buicks (or perhaps Cadillacs) instead of Chevys. Their suits cost more, but they were all off the rack, and they all looked the same anyway. Their wives had more dress clothes and jewelry than wives in the rest of America, and their hairdressers were more expensive. But just about the only thing that amounted to a major day-to-day lifestyle difference between the upper-middle class and the rest of America was the country club, with its golf course, tennis court, and swimming pool that were closed to the hoi polloi. On the other hand, there were lots of municipal golf courses, tennis courts, and swimming pools, too.
The supreme emblem of wealth in 2010 didn’t even exist in 1963. The first private jet, the Learjet Model 23, wouldn’t be delivered for another year. Private and corporate planes consisted mostly of Cessnas and Beechcrafts, small and cramped. Only a few hundred large private planes existed, and they were all propeller-driven. The owners of even the poshest of them had to recognize that an economy seat on a commercial DC-8 or Boeing 707 provided a smoother, quieter, and much faster ride.
Still, a private plane is a major difference in lifestyle, even if it is not a jet, and private planes did exist in 1963. Shall we look for a distinct upper-class culture among the wealthy?
In 1963, millionaire was synonymous with not just the affluent but the wealthy. A million dollars was serious money even by today’s standards, equivalent to about $7.2 million in 2010 dollars. But there were so few millionaires—fewer than 80,000, amounting to two-tenths of 1 percent of American families.4 The authentically wealthy in 1963 comprised a microscopic fraction of the population.
Some portion of that small number had no distinct preferences and tastes because they had made their money themselves after growing up in middle-class or working-class families. They hadn’t gone to college at all, or they had attended the nearest state college. They might live in duplexes on Park Avenue or mansions on Nob Hill, but they were the nouveaux riches. Some acted like the stereotype of the nouveaux riches. Others continued to identify with their roots and lived well but not ostentatiously.
The subset of old-money millionaires did have something resembling a distinct culture. Besides living in a few select neighborhoods, they were concentrated in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. They summered or wintered in a few select places such as Bar Harbor, Newport, and Palm Beach. They sent their children to a select set of prep schools and then to the Ivy League or the Seven Sisters. Within their enclaves, old-money America formed a distinct social group.
But besides being a tiny group numerically, there was another reason that they did not form an upper-class culture that made any difference to the rest of the nation. Those who hadn’t made the money themselves weren’t especially able or influential. Ernest Hemingway was right in his supposed exchange with F. Scott Fitzgerald.5 In 1963, the main difference between the old-money rich and everybody else was mainly that they had more money.
Take, for example, the woman who was the embodiment of the different world of the rich, Marjorie Merriweather Post. Heiress to the founder of the company that became General Foods, one of the wealthiest women in America, she owned palatial homes in Washington, Palm Beach, and on Long Island, furnished with antiques and objets from the castles of Europe. She summered in the Adirondacks, at Camp Topridge, surrounded by her private 207 acres of forest and lakes. She took her sailing vacations on Sea Cloud, the largest privately owned sailing yacht in the world, and flew in her own Vickers Viscount airliner, with a passenger cabin decorated as a living room, probably the largest privately owned aircraft in the world.
Hers was not a life familiar to many other Americans. But, with trivial exceptions, it was different only in the things that money could buy. When her guests assembled for dinner, the men wore black tie, a footman stood behind every chair, the silver was sterling, and the china had gold leaf. But the soup was likely to be beef consommé, the main course was almost always roast beef, steak, lamb chops, or broiled chicken, the starch was almost certainly potato, and the vegetable was likely to be broccoli au gratin.6 The books on the shelves of her libraries were a run-of-the-mill mix of popular fiction and nonfiction. She screened the latest films in the privacy of her homes, but the films her guests watched were standard Hollywood products. The wealthy had only a very few pastimes—polo and foxhunting are the only two I can think of, and they engaged only a fraction of the rich—that were different from pastimes in the rest of America. By and large Mrs. Post, like others among America’s wealthy, spent her leisure time doing the same kinds of things that other Americans did. The wealthy just did them in fancier surroundings and had servants. The cultural differences that did exist were ones of manners—more refined from one point of view, snootier from another. The old rich had a different cultural style, but not different cultural content. They were curiosities, not an upper class that mattered to anyone but themselves.
There is one other place we might look for a distinct elite culture in November 1963. Much of the thirtysomething culture had to do with the tastes and preferences of graduates of elite schools. Also, as I mentioned, there were a handful of census tracts in 1963 where people with college degrees already amounted to more than 50 percent of the adults—all of them near a few college campuses. So let us look for a distinctive culture among the intellectual elite in the one place where it was most likely to have already existed in 1963 if it existed anywhere: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1963, Cambridge, home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as other colleges, was as close to an intellectual capital as the United States had. The faculties of both of Cambridge’s premier institutions were full of academic superstars. MIT’s undergraduates were selected for their exceptional mathematical and scientific talents. Harvard College by 1963 was a magnet for the nation’s eighteen-year-olds with the highest SAT scores and the most glittering extracurricular accomplishments. The students in Harvard’s and MIT’s graduate schools were chosen from the cream of the graduating classes of other universities.
Within the campuses of both universities, life was different from ordinary America, amounting to a different culture in some ways—in the nature of the conversations, aesthetic sensibilities, attitudes toward religion, and political ideology, for example. The intellectual life within the universities was rich and intense. No one could attend more than a fraction of the dramatic productions, concerts, and guest lectures by famous public figures that occurred alongside the classes. Yet the culture that surrounded faculty and students outside the physical plants of Harvard and MIT was not much different from anywhere else.
I was at Harvard from September 1961 until June 1965. Harvard Square was different in some ways from Des Moines, Iowa, the city near the town where I grew up. Everybody in Cambridge seemed to drink their coffee with cream, whereas practically no one did in Des Moines. The Brattle Theatre was famous for its Bogart Festivals during reading period and had a little bar in the basement that probably didn’t have a counterpart in Des Moines. The kiosk at the Harvard Square MTA station sold foreign magazines that couldn’t have been bought in Des Moines. Just off the square was Cardullo’s, a specialty shop that sold things like tinned pâté and Cadbury’s chocolate, hard to get in Des Moines. There was live folk music at Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street, where Joan Baez had recently gotten her start. There were about ten times more bookstores within a few blocks of Harvard Square than in the entire city of Des Moines.
But that’s about it. The coffee shops where you got breakfast in Cambridge and Des Moines were the same, and they were not Au Bon Pain or European-style coffeehouses. They were places where the waitress poured your Maxwell House coffee from a glass pot into a white mug with one hand while she set down your plate of two eggs, bacon, hash browns, and white toast with the other. The rest of Cambridge’s restaurants were the same as those in Des Moines. Within easy walking distance of Harvard Yard, I recall two Chinese restaurants, one spaghetti house (Formica tables, fluorescent lighting, paper cups for your Coke), two favorite sandwich shops (Elsie’s and the newly opened Mr. Bartley’s Burgers), a beer house that Harvard people dominated (Cronin’s), and a working-class bar (Charlie’s Kitchen) where students were tolerated but were a minority. The Würsthaus, a noisy German restaurant, was Harvard Square’s closest approach to fine dining.
On the block adjacent to Harvard Square were a grocery store, a Woolworth’s five-and-dime, and a hardware store. When your parents came to visit, they stayed at the Treadway Inn, a nondescript motel, or at the tired old Commander Hotel up Garden Street. The Harvard Coop sold the same goods as Younkers Department Store in Des Moines, except for the Harvard sweatshirts.
This is not to say that the faculty and students of Harvard and MIT shared the same tastes and preferences as everybody else in Cambridge. Rather, there weren’t enough of them to impose their will. They were a majority in only a few neighborhoods. A few years earlier, in the 1960 census, just 18 percent of the adults in Cambridge had college degrees and Cambridge’s median income was just $43,641. In 1963, the Harvard Square area had not yet begun to draw in young professionals who decided that they preferred Cambridge to the suburbs. The faculty and students of Harvard and MIT had not yet been reinforced by an influx of employees of high-tech industries and research organizations. Once you subtracted all the students, faculty, and university administrators living in Cambridge in 1963, most of the rest of Cambridge was a working-class and lower-middle-class community. The latent propensity to create a different culture existed, but the intellectuals of Harvard Square didn’t have the critical mass to reshape the community in the ways that their tastes and preferences would reshape it when a critical mass materialized.7
Over the next few decades, they got that critical mass, and the result was becoming visible by the late 1980s, when thirtysomething began. By the end of the 1990s, the new culture had fully blossomed.
Its mise-en-scène is captured in Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks’s description of the transformation of Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he had attended high school in the late 1970s. Wayne is one of Philadelphia’s famous Main Line communities. When Brooks had lived there, the business district had been an unremarkable place with a few restaurants with names like L’Auberge, a few tasteful clothing stores with names like the Paisley Shop, and a small assortment of pharmacies, grocery stores, and gas stations that tended to the day-to-day needs of the affluent residents of Wayne. By the time Brooks was writing in the late 1990s, all that had changed.
The town, once an espresso desert, now has six gourmet coffeehouses.… Café Procopio is the one across from the train station, where handsome middle-aged couples come on Sunday morning, swapping newspaper sections and comparing notes across the table on their kids’ college admissions prospects.… A fabulous independent bookstore named the Reader’s Forum has moved into town where the old drugstore used to be.… The artsy set can now go to a Made by You—one of those places where you pay six times more to decorate your own mugs and dishes than it would cost to buy flatware that other people have decorated—and to Studio B, a gift emporium that hosts creative birthday parties to ensure that self-esteeming kids become even more self-esteeming.… Sweet Daddy’s sells gourmet jelly beans, spiced apple cider sorbet, and gelato in such flavors as Zuppa Inglese.… The Great Harvest Bread Company has opened up a franchise in town, one of those gourmet bread stores where they sell apricot almond or spinach feta loaf for $4.75 a pop.… If you ask them to slice the bread in the store, they look at you compassionately as one who has not yet risen to the higher realm of bread consciousness.… To the west of town there is a Zany Brainy, one of those toy stores that pretends to be an educational institution. It sells lifelike figurines of endangered animals, and it’s driven the old Wayne Toytown, which carried toys that didn’t improve developmental skills, out of business.8
My ellipses have skipped over a lot more, but you get the idea—we’re looking at the community where Hope and Michael Steadman of thirtysomething moved when they reached their forties.
The new-upper-class culture is different from mainstream American culture in all sorts of ways. Some are differences in lifestyle that individually are harmless but that cumulatively produce cultural separation between the new upper class and mainstream America. Still others involve differences that consist of good things happening to the cognitive elite that are not open to the rest of America.
If you want to get a quick sense of just how visibly different the new upper class is from mainstream America, attend parents’ night at an elementary school in a zip code with a median income at around the national average and then attend parents’ night at an elite private elementary school.
It starts in the parking lot. At the ordinary school, about half of the cars will be American brands; at the elite private school, the overwhelming majority will be foreign.9 As you go inside and begin to mingle, notice the ages of the parents. In the mainstream school, the mothers of the children are mostly in their late twenties to mid-thirties. In the elite school, you may see no mothers at all who are in their twenties. Many are in their forties. With the men, the difference is even greater, with even more of them in their forties and some in their fifties. Or older.
Another visible difference is weight. In the mainstream school, two-thirds of the parents are overweight and about a third of them are obese (proportions that are consistent with the national distribution from the 2009 survey of obesity by the National Center for Health Statistics).10 At the elite private school, the parents are, on average, a lot thinner, and obesity is rare, because the new upper class pays a lot of attention to health and fitness. They may work out at their health clubs and be attractively lean or run marathons and look emaciated. They may do yoga for an hour a day or mountain bike on the weekends and swim on weekdays, but one way or another, they are fat much less often than a random assortment of Americans.
As I describe these differences, most of the evidence must be qualitative. For the measures that are covered in the standard government surveys, the samples are not large enough to zero in on the top few centiles of the socioeconomic distribution. Much of the specialized quantitative information I need about the new elite’s tastes and preferences exists, but I cannot get hold of it. Everybody who sells advertising has detailed data on the demographics of consumer preferences for BMWs versus Ford pickup trucks or Bud Lite versus Ketel One, but such data are proprietary. The best I can do is use the DDB Life Style data that were provided to Robert Putnam in the research for Bowling Alone and are now available to other scholars.11 That database does not permit us to isolate the top few centiles—the highest income code is $100,000—but it does give a quantitative measure of the relationship between income, education, and a wide variety of tastes and preferences.
I also continue to draw heavily on the work of David Brooks and Richard Florida. Both Bobos in Paradise and The Rise of the Creative Class, along with their other books, have extensive documentation, some quantitative and some qualitative, for the generalizations they draw about the tastes and preferences of their Bobos and Creative Class, respectively, and my endnotes contain references to their discussions. My generalizations are consistent with theirs.
There is one other way to verify or reject the account you are about to read: your own experience. The people who read a book on American socioeconomic classes are self-selected for certain traits that put most of you in a position to have observed the new upper class at close hand. Judge for yourself whether my generalizations correspond to your experience.
The members of the new upper class are healthy in other ways. They know their cholesterol count and often their percentage of body fat. They monitor their diets, eating lots of whole grains, green vegetables, and olive oil, while limiting intake of red meat, processed foods, and butter. Whatever the latest rage in vitamin supplements may be, they know about it. Vegetarian and vegan restaurants find their best markets in upper-class shopping enclaves. Some members of the new upper class look upon fast food as an abomination and never, ever take their children to McDonald’s. For others, a Big Mac or Popeyes fried chicken is an occasional guilty pleasure, but hardly anyone in the new upper class approaches the about-once-a-week average of the rest of the population.12
When it comes to alcohol, the new upper class usually drinks wine or boutique beers. Many of them are eager to hold forth at length on the minutiae of either beverage, but they imbibe moderately. As for smoking, do not try to light up when you visit an upper-class home unless you want to become an instant social pariah. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about a third of American adults still smoke, but you wouldn’t know it if you hang out with the new upper class.13
In mainstream America, the statistics about the percentage of people who read a newspaper every day are depressingly low.14 In contrast, the members of the new upper class are extremely well informed about politics and current events of all sorts, and they tap into some of the same sources wherever they may live throughout the nation. Liberal members of the new upper class typically check the New York Times website every day, while conservative members of the new upper class check the Wall Street Journal every day—and large numbers on each side check the other side’s paper of record as well. Magazines you might find on the coffee table of a new-upper-class home include the New Yorker and the Economist, along with the occasional Rolling Stone, Fine Gardening, and the New York Review of Books.
The new upper class is selective in its radio listening. Those who commute by car and are liberals probably listen to National Public Radio’s Morning Edition on the way into work and All Things Considered on the way home—and a fair number of moderate and conservative members of the new upper class listen as well. They either listen to or know about Garrison Keillor—if you are in a gathering of the new upper class, you can use the phrase “all the children are above average” and be confident that almost everybody recognizes the allusion. Few members of the new upper class except political junkies listen to the genre that has come to dominate radio ratings, talk radio. The one acceptable exception is Car Talk.
Members of the new upper class don’t watch much television.15 If they watch television news, it is likely to be the PBS NewsHour. Many don’t use the television for entertainment except to watch films. Others have a few series that they watch faithfully—in recent years, perhaps House or Mad Men. Satirical animated shows such as The Simpsons and South Park have some loyal followers among the new upper class. But these favorites are unlikely to account for more than half a dozen hours of viewing a week. Meanwhile, the average American watches about thirty-five hours of television per week.16 Much of that viewing in mainstream America consists of material that is invisible to most of the new upper class—game shows, soap operas, music videos, home shopping, and hit series that members of the new upper class have never watched even once.
The new upper class does not often frequent bars with pool tables in them, bars that allow smoking, or bars with many wide screens showing professional sports. Males in the new upper class don’t spend a lot of time watching professional sports on television even at home—maybe tennis if they play tennis themselves, or golf if they golf themselves, and maybe some of the games of their favorite baseball or football team. But sitting down in front of the TV at noon on Saturday and Sunday and watching sports for the rest of the afternoon is uncommon.
The new upper class and mainstream America don’t take the same kind of vacations. Money comes into play here, but the vacations are also different in kind. For elite thirtysomethings who have not yet had children, the vacation might consist of backpacking into a remote lake in British Columbia or diving off Belize, whereas their age contemporaries in the working class and middle class already have children and are driving them to Disney World. Fortysomethings of the new upper class are likely to be attracted to a barge trip through Bordeaux or chartering a sailboat to cruise the Maine coast, not a trip to Las Vegas. New-upper-class and mainstream fiftysomethings might both choose to go on a cruise, but the new upper class would never consider booking a passage on one of the big liners with two thousand passengers. They take their cruise on a small all-suite ship accommodating just a hundred passengers, and it’s going to the Galápagos.
For mainstream America, a trip to Europe, Asia, or South America is a big deal—something that many never do even once. For the new upper class, foreign vacations are a normal part of their lives. But the ties of the new upper class to the rest of the world do not depend on vacations. For many, foreign travel is a routine part of their working lives. Senior executives, consultants, and international attorneys are constantly on the move, visiting foreign clients and subsidiaries. Conferences and guest lectures may take the star academic overseas several times a year. Members of the new upper class in every occupational domain are likely to have coworkers and colleagues from around the world with whom they interact regularly, and professional relationships that often merge with personal friendships. Many in the intellectual wing of the new upper class feel more comfortable around their intellectual colleagues from other countries than they do with Americans who aren’t intellectuals.
A less visible but more fundamental kind of cultural separation involves the raising of children. In one sense, there is no separation. Put two mothers with children in strollers next to each other on a park bench, and they will probably be deep in conversation about naps and feeding schedules within moments, whatever their differences in age, race, or socioeconomic class. But Hope Steadman’s relentless mothering in thirtysomething reflected a real phenomenon.
The children of the new upper class are the object of intense planning from the moment the woman learns she is pregnant. She sets about researching her choice of obstetrician immediately (if she hasn’t already done it in anticipation of the pregnancy), and her requirements are stringent. She does not drink alcohol or allow herself to be exposed even to secondhand smoke during her pregnancy. She makes sure her nutritional intake exactly mirrors the optimal diet and takes classes (along with her husband) to prepare for a natural childbirth—a C-section is a last resort. She gains no more and no less than the prescribed weight during her pregnancy. She breast-feeds her newborn, usually to the complete exclusion of formula, and tracks the infant’s growth with the appropriate length and weight charts continually.17 The infant is bombarded with intellectual stimulation from the moment of birth, and sometimes from the moment that it is known that conception has occurred. The mobile over the infant’s crib and the toys with which he is provided are designed to induce every possible bit of neural growth within the child’s cerebral cortex.
By the time the child is a toddler, some new-upper-class mothers return to their careers, turning over daytime child care to a nanny (sometimes selected in part for the second language that the parents think the child should learn) or to a high-end preschool during the day. But many new-upper-class mothers put their careers on hold while the children are young, and sometimes until the children leave for college. The term soccer mom came into being at about the time that the post-1970s mothers in the upper-middle class had children in elementary school.
The childbearing and child-rearing practices of the new upper class are admirable in many ways. It would be wonderful if every pregnant woman were as meticulous about taking care of herself and the unborn child as new-upper-class women are. Some features of child rearing are universally accepted to be important for the development of children—basics such as open affection, verbal interaction with infants and toddlers, and consistent discipline. On these and other good parenting practices, social scientists find that, as groups, parents in the upper-middle class come out well ahead of parents in the middle and working classes.18
The downside is that new-upper-class parents tend to overdo it. The children in elite families sometimes have schedules so full of ballet classes, swimming lessons, special tutoring, and visits to the therapist that they have no time to be children. It is not urban legend, but documented fact, that some parents send their children to test-preparation schools for the entrance test to exclusive preschools.19 The lengths to which some parents will go to maximize their child’s chance to get into a prestigious college are apparently without limit. And the hovering behavior of these parents once the child has gone to college is so common that it has led to a phrase for them—“helicopter parents”—that is in common use among the administrators of America’s universities. Considerable social science research has also found that elite parents’ constant praise of their children can backfire, because it so often consists of telling children how smart they are, not of praising children for things they actually do. As a result, many children become protective of their image of being smart and are reluctant to take chances that might damage that image.20
Other mothers love their children just as much as upper-class mothers do, but their children experience different upbringings, with cultural implications in the long term. One major reason will be discussed in chapter 8: A much larger proportion of working-class than upper-middle-class children are raised in broken homes or never-formed homes. All by itself, that difference has pervasive implications for the child’s socialization and for different social norms across classes.
Another source of cultural separation, mentioned earlier, is the advanced age at which women in the new upper class tend to have their babies. To be specific: In 2006, the mean age at first birth among all American women with fewer than sixteen years of education was 23.0. The mean age for women with sixteen years of education was 29.5. The mean for women with seventeen or more years of education was 31.1. These differences in age at first birth cut many ways. A mother in her thirties is more mature than a mother in her twenties, and maturity is statistically associated with better child-rearing practices. But the issue we’re discussing now is cultural separation. The Little League functions differently (and has a different chance of functioning at all) when dads are thirtyish versus when dads are fiftyish. The generation gap between a mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter is different when the mother is in her mid-thirties and when the mother is approaching fifty.
Perhaps the most general cultural difference—one that can be bad or good depending on individual cases—is that mainstream America is a lot more relaxed than the new upper class about their children. I don’t mean that other American parents care less, but that, as a group, they are less inclined than upper-class parents to obsess about how smart their baby is, how to make the baby smarter, where the baby should go to preschool, and where the baby should go to law school. They buy the car seat that’s on sale at Walmart instead of spending hours searching the web for the seat with the best test results in simulated head-on collisions. When their children get into trouble at school, they are less determined than upper-class parents to come up with reasons why it’s the teacher’s fault, not their child’s.
One of the major preoccupations of upper-class parents during their children’s teenage years, the college admissions process, is almost entirely absent in mainstream America. Only a small proportion of colleges in the United States are hard to get into. Everywhere else, all you have to do is apply and attach a halfway decent high school transcript and ACT or SAT score. Outside elite circles, there may be mild angst about whether children get into their first choice in the state university system, but no more than that. Most mainstream American parents lose no sleep whatsoever because their child’s college is not in the top ten in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.21
We have now come to a domain in which the life of much of the new upper class has changed fundamentally while the life of much of mainstream America has not. These changes are not restricted to the new upper class, applying more broadly to most people who work in managerial jobs and the professions. But they apply most lavishly to the people who have gotten farthest up the ladder.
Some lucky people in those occupations no longer have a set time to report to work and a specific place they have to be. They work out of their homes, using a computer, and if they feel like taking the laptop to the beach, there’s nothing to stop them. For others, the constraints have been loosened. They work on a flextime arrangement, or combine some work at the office with some work at home.
For those who work at the office, that office has been reinvented.22 The office of 1963, with desks for the underlings in the middle and private offices for the senior executives lining the outer walls, each with a secretary sitting outside the door, has nearly disappeared. Corporate offices around the country—not just the work spaces at trendy new companies like Google, but at Procter & Gamble, too—have been reorganized and rebuilt on principles that are supposed to maximize creative interaction. Sometimes everyone is in the same room, from the CEO on down, working without private offices. Sometimes the office is organized into teams that interact—ensemble individualism is one of the terms of art for this kind of structure. The feel of the physical work space is different from that of the traditional office, emphasizing high ceilings, availability of outside views to everyone (the boss no longer monopolizes the view with a corner office), abundant and well-appointed hangout spaces, bold colors, exposed structural elements, indirect lighting, and lots of artwork.23
The hierarchy and status signals of the traditional office have been stripped, or at least reduced, in the offices where the new upper class works. In many places, everyone is on a first-name basis. Dress codes have been relaxed or abandoned altogether. Instead of looking for organization men, corporations pride themselves on seeking out the free spirit and the eccentric, with the proviso that the free-spirited and eccentric also be really talented. If you are really talented, and if your job is one where creativity is essential, you’ve got it made. You are at the center of senior management’s concern. What might make you happier? What support can be lavished upon you to free up your creativity? Above all, nothing must be done to cramp your style.
None of this means that the lucky people of the new upper class who work in these occupations are lolling about. The graduates of the top law schools who get those coveted jobs at the big New York and Washington law firms may get a starting salary in six figures, but they are also expected to put in sixty-plus hours every week. At one of the leading quant hedge funds, there’s a reason that management maintains a room containing nothing but racks filled with every variety of candy, free for the taking: The firm’s genius mathematicians tend to be around at all hours, needing a sugar high to keep going. The genius programmers at Apple and Google and Microsoft are notorious for pulling all-nighters when a deadline looms. But the elites who work those long hours live in a world where work has more of the characteristics of fun than ever before.
For the 82 percent of American adults who are not in a managerial position or in the professions, that revolution which is so celebrated in accounts of the transformed workplace has had hardly any effect on their lives.
Some of them are support staff in the offices where the new upper class work, and they get the advantages of being in a physical space that is more attractive and functional than it was a few decades ago. But support staff are still expected to be on the premises during working hours. Maybe they can work out a flextime arrangement, but beyond that their jobs are conducted very much as they always have been.
Other workplaces in America haven’t changed even that much. The technological changes in hospitals have been sweeping, but the nurses, dietitians, respiratory therapists, and orderlies who work there do their jobs much as they always have, subject to the same constraints of hours and place that those jobs have always imposed (and the same is true, I should add, of physicians). The schools where K–12 teachers work have more audiovisual and computer equipment than they used to, but the teachers still usually sit at desks in front of classrooms of students and try to get them to absorb the day’s material, and they have to be at the school from the time it opens until the time it closes. Police do the same things they’ve always done, with more help from the computer. Shop owners, plumbing contractors, insurance agents, and other people running their own small businesses are subject to the same constraints and routines that their occupations have always required. Save for their computers, the workplace revolution has largely skipped them.
In blue-collar occupations, some of the tools have changed. If you drive a delivery truck for FedEx, you use a handheld device that connects with a sophisticated computer tracking system that would have been unimaginable in 1963. But the structure of the world of work is usually the same. If you work in the produce department of Safeway, install drywall, cook in a restaurant, repair cars, or mine coal, you have a shift to work. There is a time to punch in and a time to punch out, and a physical location where you are to be during that time. The surroundings of the job are much as they ever have been. A construction site is still a construction site, an oil rig is still an oil rig, a farm is still a farm, a loading dock is still a loading dock. Some assembly lines have changed so that they are not quite as mind-numbingly boring as they used to be, but that has happened only in some industries, and American assembly lines have been disappearing anyway as manufacturing has moved overseas.
I have given only the barest outline of the tribal customs and rites of the new upper class. I spent a paragraph on new-upper-class vacations, while David Brooks devotes eight pages of Bobos in Paradise to them. I didn’t even mention sex; Brooks has another eight pages about that. I didn’t mention religion; see all thirty-seven pages of his chapter 6. I gave a few pages to changes in the world of work; Richard Florida devotes the better part of an entire book to them. But the lacuna that is likely to be at the top of your mind is politics. The new upper class tends to be liberal, right?
There’s no getting around it: Every way of answering that question produces a yes. In chapter 3, I give politics a longer discussion, because it relates to the isolation of the new upper class. But that reality need not obscure another one: Most of the description of the elite culture in this chapter cuts across ideological lines. The details can be different. As a group, elite liberals are more exercised about being green than are elite conservatives. The dinner party given by a conservative hostess of the new upper class is more likely to feature red meat as the entrée than a dinner party given by a liberal one. The children of elite conservatives probably face a higher risk of a spanking for misbehavior than the children of elite liberals. But these differences are swamped by the ways in which people occupying the elite positions in America have adopted similar norms and mores. The essence of the culture of the new upper class is remarkably consistent across the political spectrum.