Bobos in Paradise

Bobos in Paradise was a book written by David Brooks in 2000. The word "bobo", Brooks's most famous coinage, stands for "bourgeois bohemian". This is Brooks' term for the 1990s' descendants of the yuppies. Often of the corporate upper-middle to upper class, they rarely oppose mainstream society, claim highly tolerant views of others, buy lots of expensive and exotic items, and believe American society to be meritocratic.

"Bobo" is often used in place of the word "yuppie", which has usually negative connotations. In fact, even Brooks uses "yuppie" in a negative sense throughout his book.

Brooks's thesis in Bobos in Paradise was that this "new upper class" represented a marriage between the liberal idealism of the 1960s and the self-interest of the Reagan era. Critics of Brooks's thesis argue that he did not provide an argument for why this elite was specifically "new". Since the 1980s and '90s were are considered to have been a time of low social mobility in the United States, many of them consider it likely that the "bobo" trend merely represents changing tastes and preferences of the existing upper class.