Bobos

            After reading The New York Time's Bestseller, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks, I realized that in order to become part of this "content" upper class, I need a college education. .
             A college degree is very important in American society. A good education leads to a high-quality job, which leads to money and ends in society's views of happiness. The tale of the educated class began in the eighteenth century. This sophisticated group is called the bourgeois bohemians or better knows as the Bobos. Bourgeois is defined as of, relating to, or typical of the middle class. A bohemian is defined as a person with artistic or literary interests who disregard conventional standards of behavior. It used to be easy to differentiate between the bourgeois capitalism and the bohemian culture. The bourgeois worked for corporations, were prim, and went to church every Sunday. The bohemians were free- spirited artists and scholars. Bohemians held the values of the freethinking 1960s while the bourgeois were the hard workers of the 1980s. Brooks explains .
             how the early Bohemians formed their rebellious ideas and combined with the bourgeois materialistic definition of success. Brooks goes on throughout the book explaining the sudden changes he witnessed when our society turned into Bobos. He gives specific examples using the small town of Wayne. "A new culture has swept into town and overlaid itself onto the Paisley Shop, the Neighborhood League Shop, and the other traditional Main Line establishments"(55). The two cultures combined in this town and it is clear that the small town of Wayne has changed. "There probably still aren't a lot of artists and intellectuals in Wayne, suddenly there are a lot of people who want to drink coffee like one"(55).
             It amazes me how fast our society can change. Two extremely different types of people form together to make up the new upper class of America.