Benjamin J Newland

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


The first thing I wanted to know was "what's a Bobo?" I didn't raise my hand though, because it was the middle of the Bishop's address at Diocesan Convention and it didn't seem like question time. The Bishop had just mentioned Brooks' book as containing pertinent information for Episcopalians. This was last October; it tool me a few months to get to it.

To answer the obvious question, a Bobo is Brooks' created term. He makes it out of Bohemian and Bourgeois. His thesis is that these two broad cultural forces—the conservative, wealthy, establishmentarian bourgeois and the intellectual, reactionary, counter-cultural bohemian—which used to be so much in opposition to each other are now reconciled. From the 1850s through the 1950s the bourgeois and the bohemian were opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. Since the 1960s the newly risen meritocratic upper middle class has united them in ways that show up in consumption patterns, marriages, and spirituality.

It's an interesting thesis, and Brooks writes with deft use of anecdotes and plenty of amusing turns of phrase. I don't often laugh out loud when reading non-fiction, but he had me at several points. It isn't scholarly cultural analysis, which he admits in the introduction, but for broad strokes his argument gives insight.

A particularly interesting point for me is that this book was published in 2000. Before the dot-com crash. Before 9/11. Before the housing bubble popped. You'd think these events would render the book hopelessly out of date. There are certainly blind-spots, but on the whole much of what Brooks says still holds true, despite profoundly changed circumstances. In fact, I found myself putting more trust in his conclusions precisely because he'd drawn them without knowing what would happen in the next decade. If you can make a point about culture that still carries water after the culture is profoundly diverted by external events, then maybe your point carries even more water than you first thought.

If you're interested in some lightly used populist analysis of the new upper-middle class, give the Bobos a read.

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