Central tendencies versus the hollow-core story: A half-century of push and pull in America’s cities

A word, “yuppie,” is probably as clear a signal of a shift in the fortune of cities as we are likely to find. It’s an acronym, really, and stands for “young urban professional.” Both the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary1 and the Oxford Dictionary2 identify its coinage as arising in the 1980s and define the word this way: “a young college-educated adult who is employed in a well-paying profession and who lives and works in or near a large city” and “A fashionable young middle-class person with a well-paid job.”