Overheard with Ajay Raju: Tom McGrath on yuppies, wealth, and the new gilded age
Philadelphia -- In this episode of Overheard, host Ajay Raju sits down with Tom McGrath, former editor of Philadelphia magazine, 2022 Writer of The Year, National City and Regional Magazine Awards, and author of highly praised book, Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation. Ajay and Tom start the conversation with the exploration of the young urban professionals who defined the 1980s. Tom and Ajay then trace how the values born in that era, celebration of wealth, shareholder-first capitalism, financial engineering, set the stage for today's widening gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else.
The conversation moves from the yuppie 1980s to the AI-driven present, as the two debate whether America's winner-take-all capitalism can produce broad prosperity or whether it's building toward a new aristocracy of a handful of companies and individuals. They dig into monopoly power, government's role in picking corporate winners, the Trump savings accounts for newborns, and whether taxing the wealthy more is a fairer fix than relying on corporate philanthropy.
The discussion turns personal and philosophical as Ajay and Tom consider what AI means for human creativity, work, and identity, whether writers and artists still have an edge over the machines, and whether society will crave "authentic" human experience even as automation and enhancement become normal. They close on geopolitics: rare earths, energy chokepoints, and whether the next century will be shaped by whoever wins today's technology race, and at what human cost.
