This segment of the upper middle class has taken on significantly more meaning since the 1980s and ’90s made it shamelessly cool to be rich. I remember the very moment I realized that the look-out-for-the-underdog 1960s and ’70s were over. In the early 1980s, I was in a hurry and I was cutting through a poster shop to meet a friend. As I took in the pictures around me one stopped me dead in my tracks. It was huge. A sexy blond woman in a mink coat leaned against a sparkling new Mercedes Benz. Across the bottom, in large bold letters, it said, “Poverty Sucks.”
