Y

Yuppie

Yuppie is an acronym for ‘Young, Upwardly-mobile, Professional’, although
some would give the ‘u’ as standing for ‘Urban’. It was the first of a series of
acronyms coined by American journalists to describe the social groups that
emerged, or became prominent as electoral target groups, during the 1980s.
Others include ‘Dinks’ (‘Dual Income, No Kids’) and variations on the idea of
comfortably-off middle-aged people whose children are no longer financial
burdens. What all these groups have in common is that they were ideal
electoral audiences for policies aimed at reducing both taxes and social
expenditure , as such groups had no direct personal need for state-provided
education, health services, public transport and so on (seewelfarism). It was
precisely these groups that US President Ronald Reagan’s first federal budgets,
in 1981 and 1982, were aimed at, and the strategy was extremely successful.
The brash arrogance of the Yuppies and the self-satisfied attitudes of the other
acronymic groups soon began to appal Americans, however, particularly when
some were revealed to have participated in illegal trading in the stock-markets
and other abuses of their, already very extensive, freedoms. It was not a purely
American phenomenon, of course. Many other Western societies experienced
the politics of Yuppiedom, though no other country gave the favoured groups
the respectability that they briefly enjoyed in the USA. In the United King-
dom, for example, similar tax and economic policies were targeted successfully
at particular voter groups by theConservative Party, not only the City of
London-based Yuppies, but also their down-market cousin, ‘Essex Man’.
Although Essex Man and, eventually, Yuppie were recognized as terms of
scorn, this has not stopped those who might be so described from enjoying
their prosperity, nor prevented governments from reaping the electoral benefits
of having encouraged these groups. The phrase was seldom heard by the early
21st century, but it played so large a part in characterizing the politics of the last
two decades of the 20th that historians will long have recourse to it. The word
was the most obvious symbol of a shift towards egocentric politics arising from
the removal of much of the socio-economic security Western societies had
built for themselves after 1945.