You’ve surely seen them: the packs of 20-somethings stalking the sidewalks of Manhattan in button-down shirts and vests embroidered with the name of an investment bank. Or perhaps you’ve stood behind them in line at a coffee shop, counting the minutes as they order a matcha latte with oat milk. Maybe you’ve listened to them discuss their punishing Pilates regimen, or the amazing Wagyu short ribs they ate last night.

The status signifiers may have changed, but these eager knowledge workers are best understood as yuppies. Short for “young urban professional,” the term can be traced back to the 1980s, when it was used to describe a new cohort arriving in cities: the bankers and lawyers who earned high salaries, coveted loft apartments, trained for marathons, owned Cuisinarts and loved sushi, Brie, and chardonnay. The yuppies were both envied for their pleasures and derided as shallow, consumerist and status hungry. The word became a weapon: Across cities, phrases like “Die Yuppie Scum” were scrawled onto the sides of buildings.

But perhaps we were too dismissive of the yuppies. So much of what we take for granted today — from our meritocratic rat race to our gentrified neighborhoods to our culture of overwork, fitness training and foodie obsession — was born in the yuppie-made 1980s. In that moment, they fashioned a bargain that we are still living with: An increasingly diverse professional class signed up for a life of hard-won affluence, at the cost of deep inequality for everyone else.

Yuppies were called into being by the forces that were remaking the economy in the 1980s. After the Carter and Reagan administrations loosened the regulations governing Wall Street, finance began to generate a greater share of profits than manufacturing or services. Investment banks and law firms now shaped the fates of the corporations they had once served. As America hitched its fortunes to finance, those banks and firms began to chop up, spin off, merge, offshore or otherwise squeeze short-term value out of the nation’s legacy corporations. But to do it, they needed legions of employees to handle the grunt work: the proofreading, drafting and document review that kept the takeover machinery in motion.

To find those employees, recruiters flooded the campuses of America’s elite universities. In 1976, less than 5 percent of surveyed seniors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School were headed to Wall Street for investment banking. By 1987, it was one in three. At Yale, 40 percent of the entire graduating class of 1986 applied to work at the investment bank First Boston. At Princeton, hopeful students waited all night to secure a spot on recruiters’ schedules. In his book “Liar’s Poker,” Michael Lewis describes trying to get an interview with Lehman Brothers in the early ’80s: “I had stood in six inches of snow with about 50 other students, awaiting the opening of the Princeton University career services office.”

The number of WASPy white men at elite schools was simply too small to keep up with the torrent of financial deal-making. Chasing rapid growth, banks and law firms began to hire all sorts of graduates — first Jewish and Irish and Italian men, then, as the women’s and civil rights movements diversified the university-bound population, a growing number of white women and Black, Latino and Asian men and women. In an age of ruthless competition, identity mattered less than workers’ credentials and willingness to work grueling hours.