Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
When I first moved to Dallas, I lived in the Uptown area, a trendy area filled with young, upwardly mobile professionals, upscale bars and restaurants and chic boutiques. As a small-town guy, my neighbors’ lifestyle choices confounded me. I could not understand why they were willing to pay $5 for coffee, $10 for a burger or pay anything at all to have someone park their car for them. Indeed, valet parking may have been the most annoying traits about this sect of people. The fact that someone was so lazy, or had such an sense of entitlement around them, they had to have someone park a car for them was maddening. And in Uptown, valet parking was everywhere, even at the local gym.
Over the next few months, as I became more acclimated with the urban lifestyle, I found the behavior of my neighbors to be amusing, but still didn’t understand it. On the one hand, they tried so hard to fit in the ultra-materialistic Dallas social scene, while on the other they tried to fake a level of cultural maturity. In one of my first blog posts ever, I observed the following:
The typical Uptown resident is somewhere between the age of 25-35 and unlike any other major city in the US, these “kids” are still attached to their parents’ umbilical chord. I love standing in my parking garage and playing “Count the Audi’s” and determining how many were bought with mommy and daddy’s money and how many were actually earned through hard work (I estimate that only 10% of Uptown residents have earned what they own.) This lack of independence is sure to affect one’s emotional maturity and their attitude towards life. Uptown residents desire to make money, present an image of success, and in engage in drunken acts of debauchery Thursday thru Saturday, but these kids lack culture. Try and stop an Uptown resident and question them about Sartre, Moliere, Botticelli, Gentileschi, or even Whitman or Ginsberg and you are bound to be faced with silence.
Looking back, I realize I was a little harsh, but I was just recently out of college and armed with hubris of a liberal arts degree. I completely misjudged residents of Uptown. While they definitely favored an opulent lifestyle, it certainly wasn’t that of J.R. Ewing, or even Jerry Jones. They also seemed to be a little more well-rounded than the cocaine and boob-job crowd of North Dallas. Yes, this group shopped at Whole Foods, listened to NPR and the read the the New Yorker, as well the Wall Street Journal.
I love Whole Foods and listen to NPR, but I still do not completely understand the mind of the young, urban professional; however after reading David Brooks’, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, I have a better understanding of who they are trying to be. In the Introduction, Brooks describes a group of “…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” and he spends the next 260 pages exploring this meritocracy in-depth.
The first chapter deals with the “the rise of the educated class,” which in Brooks’ opinion opened the doors, so to speak, for a new segment of society to enter into the upper class, beginning in the 1950′s. Brooks raises some valid points in this section, but at times, it feels like reading the genealogy in the Bible–you know it’s going to help you understand the book the further you proceed, but at times it’s extremely dry.
Brooks next dives into “Consumption,” which is considerably more entertaining than the previous chapter. Here he tries to explain to his audience why certain Bobos are willing to spend $5 on a cup of coffee or why they tend to shop at places like Restoration Hardware or Whole Foods, which ties in nicely with the next chapter on business. In short, Bobo’s seek to meld elements of the counterculture of the 60′s and the business acumen of the yuppies of the 80′s. In addition to my Uptown neighbors, I immediately began to think of the founders of the technology companies in the Silicon Valley and Obama voters.
Not that all Bobo’s are Obama supporters. However, in the chapter on “Politics and Beyond,” Brooks writing about politicians that appeal to Bobo’s (in 2000, mind you) writes the following:
These politicians do not engage in the old culture war rhetoric. They are not podium-pounding “conviction politicians” of the sort tha tthrived during the age of confrontation. Instead, they weave together different approaches. They traingulate. They know they have to appeal to diverse groups. They seek a Third Way beyond the old categories of left and right.
This is the exact message President Obama has been preaching since his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Brooks does an excellent job of breaking down sociological studies and keeping a subject that could become boring–very easily–fresh. Even though it is a bit dated, there are many insights in the book that are extremely relevant today–like the piece on politics I just shared. Looking back on another book I recently reviewed, the character Jonathan Franzen creates in “Walter Berglund” in Freedom embodies many of the elements of the Bobo’s Mr. Brooks describes. Indeed, after reading Bobos in Paradise, I have a better understanding of Franzen’s characters. Perhaps, I should have read Bobos first.
