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

David Brooks, “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” Simon & Schuster , 2000, 273 pps  

Brooks's thesis is that this new upper class is composed of a marriage between the liberal idealism of the 1960s and the self-interest of the 1980s.  I found the book entertaining and, in some parts, even thought provoking; especially since the book was written in 2000 and many are now questioning if we are getting our “bang for the buck” in higher education.

The word bobo, is an abbreviated form of the words bourgeois and bohemian; Brooks describes a a fusion of two heretofore incompatible social classes (the counter-cultural, hedonistic and artistic bohemian, and the white collar, capitalist bourgeois). These are the successors of the yuppies.  They believe American society to be meritocratic.

It used to be pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeois worked for corporations, wore gray, and went to church. The bohemians were artists and intellectuals. Bohemians championed the values of the liberated 1960s; the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s.

My Notes:

Pg. 10:  The author noticed in the late 1990’s that most people among the college-educated set, seemed to have rebel attitudes and social-climbing attitudes all scrambled together.  It became clear that this observation is a cultural consequence of the information age.  The people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products.  These are highly educated people who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success: Bobos.

Pg. 11:  All societies have elites, and our educated elites are a lot more enlightened than some of the older elites, which were based on blood or wealth or military valor.  And wherever they settle they make life more diverse and interesting.

Pg. 25:  By 1960 the average verbal SAT score for incoming freshmen at Harvard was 678, and the math score was 695—these are stratospheric scores.  The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the Harvard freshman class of 1960.  The campus gates were thrown open on the basis of brains rather than blood.  The sheer number of educated Americans exploded.  Many of the new students were women.  In 1960 there were about 2,000 institutions of higher learning.  By 1980 there were 3,200. 

Pg. 31:  The social revolution of the late sixties was not a miracle or a natural disaster.  It was a logical response to the trends of the crucial years between 1955 and 1965.  The culture of upscale America was due for a revolution.

Pg 37:  The whole thrust of the information age has been to reward education and widen the income gap between the educated and the uneducated.  Moreover, the upper middle class has grown from a small appendage of the middle class into a distinct demographic hump populated largely by people with fancy degrees. 

Pg. 43:  The values of the bourgeois mainstream culture and the values of the 1960s counter-culture have merged.  That culture war has ended, at least within the educated class.  In its place that class has created a third culture, which is reconciliation between the previous two.  The educated elites didn’t set out to create this reconciliation.  It is the product of millions of individual efforts to have things both ways.  But it is now the dominant tone of our age.  They emerge from this process as bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos.

Pg. 61:  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 themselves by their means of consumption.