The Rise Of The Overclass (Newsweek 1995)

You've probably never heard of the overclass, which is just how its members like it; they have a lot to answer for. They are the people who put Jim Carrey on magazine covers, who renamed blue-green "teal" and keep loaning money to Donald Trump--not out of any sinister conspiracy to ruin the country but because, well, it's their job. As "professionals" and "managers" they lay claim to an increasing share of the national income, but they wind up spending most of it at mirror-walled restaurants where they have to eat $10 arugula salads. They're famous for having opinions, but it's hard to know what these are, since they never call talk-radio shows. If they didn't exist we'd have to invent them, because otherwise we'd have no answer to the question, whatever happened to all those Yuppies we used to see running around, anyway?

We are witnessing an epochal moment in American sociology, the birth of a new class. There is, obviously, nothing new in the fact that some people in America have more money, influence and prestige than others. But designating them "the overclass" is not just another way for journalists to package the squeal of the skewered bourgeoisie. When "the poor" became "the underclass" it meant no longer thinking of them as just "a lot of people without money," but as the inheritors of a "culture of poverty." Similarly, the overclass refers to a group with a common culture and interests, with the obvious difference from the underclass that nobody is trying to get out of the overclass.