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David Brooks is senior editor of The Weekly Standard and author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon & Schuster).

Who are the Bobos?

The Bobos are the people who have these humongous new kitchens with Viking ranges that send up heat like a space shuttle rocket turned upside down. They're the people with the sub-zero refrigerators because zero just wouldn't be cold enough.

They are like half hippies/half yuppies. They've got sort of the spirituality of the hippies but the moneymaking of the yuppies, and they merged these two opposite styles together.

Where does the word Bobo come from?

The hippies, who are Bohemian, and the yuppies, who are Bourgeois. And if you take Bourgeois and Bohemian and jam them together you get Bobo.

When did you realize that we've merged capitalism with being a hippie?

I was in Europe for the first half of the '90s and I came back to the town where my parents live outside of Philadelphia. Suddenly it had six gourmet coffee shops. And they've got one of these Great Harvest Bread Companies, which sell a piece of bread for $4.75. It had one of these organic food markets where you can get your vegetarian dog biscuits and your all-natural hair coloring, because if you're going to artificially color your hair, you want it to be all-natural.

So there was this whole overlay of Berkeley from the 1960s in this republican place. And I thought, America has changed.

What are we learning about Bobos in regard to understanding affluence and consumption?

Well, we're learning a lot. Bobos turn everything into education. So you can't just buy a receiver or toothpaste, you have to get a Ph.D. in toothpasteology. You learn all about it before you go out and buy Tom's of Maine.

But then the second thing is you want to show you're not really a materialistic person. So I have a section in the book called, "The Code of Financial Correctness," which is how to spend millions of dollars and ways to show you to test money and material.

So for example, it's cool to spend lots of money on things that are necessities, like a slate shower stall, because that shows you're one with the zen-like rhythms of nature, but it's not cool to spend something on a luxury like a $25,000 media center. So it's not cool to buy a Corvette, because that's a luxury. But a practical Range Rover for $65,000, that's cool.

What are some of the other rules of financial correctness?

Well, there's the rule of one-downsmanship, that everything we own should look like it was once owned by someone much poorer than ourselves. So like the baby gates on the stairs will be made from wood recycled from a rabbit hutch on a 19th century Appalachian farm.

How did the issue of consumption emerge early on in merging the Bohemian with the capitalist?

Even though Bobos consider themselves arty and creative, they're ultimately about achievement and about building things and making things and getting better and better. So they're very entrepreneurial and very hard working. Some may go to work with blue hair and pieces of metal through their faces, but they've got the sleeping bag under the work station because they work phenomenally hard. And so the rebel is in them but so is the worker.

They're goal-oriented. They're not a very sensuous, sit-around-and-enjoy-the-moment lot. They're a hard-working lot. Everything has to be educational. Everything has to make them better.

I've done research in the past few months at various college campuses and the kids are phenomenal workaholics. They go to sleep at 2:00 in the morning and they wake up at 6:00. I mean, I've ran across kids who have play dates. They schedule half-hour chunks in their day when they can talk with friends because otherwise they have no time for that.

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July (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46