Brooks eventually is also a "mixed-up" Bobo which he admitted in an interview with Gwen Ifill of the "News Hour" ("Yeah, I consider myself a Bobo with bad grades. If I had studied harder, I could have got into Harvard, and really made all the money and had the really big kitchen"). Of course he starts his book jeering at the Bobos (and continues to do that for about 47 pages). He ridicules and caricatures the new bankers who sit in coffeehouses listening to alternative music, He scoffs at the artsy and the rich types, who love Starbucks and Pottery Barn, bookshelves and Crate & Barrel and whose chopping tables are copied fashions from the farm of French peasants -- a type whose anxieties include how to spend money without betraying the bohemians Till there it is okay. But the problem starts when Brooks attempts to give authenticity to this newfound culture with all its new sense of taste and style. He starts appreciating the Bobo culture because of its "sober" bourgeois achievement, which takes into it the creative, and the spontaneous element of the sixties. On one level he scoffs at those Bobos who think $ 10K outdoor Jacuzzi is crass but $20K slate shower reflects simple rhythm of life. Yet on another level he appreciates this new upper class style which is based on the display of sufficient taste to know what the best is and to choose it -- whether...

He has his full support for them who find that it is not okay to spend extravagantly on something for display along; it is okay to spend extravagantly on something that is useful in enhancing one's authentic personality.
Brooks also admitted that his book has little to do with politics. Yet he says that he credits the Bobo culture in changing the stances of the American political parties. He thinks we need to take the time for Bobo standards to settle in. In business, he praises the Bobo emphasis on creativity, flat hierarchies, flexibility and open expression and he believes that Bobos have made life more enjoyable and interesting. Brooks says (and not with contempt but seriously) that "while once people thought a true painting or a poem or a protest march could revolutionize society, now you have people such as Nike's Phil Knight who talk as if a sneaker can."

But despite all these new developments, Americans still live in a society that has no gun control, sprawling anti-human suburbs, and 80-hour workweeks. And big corporations growing at the expense of small businesses. Bobos do not care for that. They would rather be happy and contented with their Zen-like rhythm of life. Brooks fails to point that out.

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Bobos in Paradise