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

But if you are in an elite based on brainpower, like today’s elite, you need to come up with the subtle signifiers that will display your own spiritual and intellectual identity—your qualification for being in the elite in the first place.

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 wasn’t just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated people’s attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting hard

Shopping may not be the most intellectual exercise on earth, but it is one of the more culturally revealing. Indeed, one of the upshots of the new era is that Karl Marx may have had it exactly backward. He argued that classes are defined by their means of production. But it could be true that, in the information age at least, classes define themsel

That means the most prestigious professions involve artistic self-expression as well as big bucks.

Marx told us that classes inevitably conflict, but sometimes they just blur. The values of the bourgeois mainstream culture and the values of the 1960s counterculture have merged.

In a world dominated by the merchant classes, these artists no longer had aristocratic sponsors to flatter, which was emancipating, but they had to fend for themselves in the marketplace, which brought its own traumas. To succeed, artists and writers had to appeal to an impersonalized audience, and many of these creative types came to resent their

When faced with a tension between competing values, they do what any smart privileged person bursting with cultural capital would do. They find a way to have both. They reconcile opposites.

Socially enlightened members of the educated elite tend to be disturbed by the widening gap between rich and poor and are therefore made somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that their own family income now tops $80,000. Some of them dream of social justice yet went to a college where the tuition costs could feed an entire village in Rwanda for a yea

Though they admire art and intellect, they find themselves living amidst commerce, or at least in that weird hybrid zone where creativity and commerce intersect.