Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, by David Brooks. Simon & Schuster, 284 pp.

David Brooks, a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard, is also an amateur sociologist; which is to say, someone who makes mental footnotes to the New York Times. His field of specialization is the American bourgeoisie. In this much-discussed new book, Brooks demonstrates, to his own satisfaction, that a decisive shift has taken place in the folkways of the ruling class. The old conflict between the stodgy business ethos and the wild-eyes freedom of creative rebels is over; art and commerce have reached a mutually satisfying truce. Yuppie-style consumption is dead. In its place, there now reigns the Starbucks/National Public Radio aesthetic of the "bourgeois bohemians" — or, to use Brooks's coinage, "bobos."

The argument of Bobos in Paradise is simple, and the author restates it every two pages (perhaps as a courtesy to the people he is discussing, who must do their reading between cell phone messages). Half a century ago, ancient issues of the Times reveal, the American ruling class was WASP in its deepest cells. People whose ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower sedulously mimicked those who did — conducting their lives with a certain quiet and unpleasant dignity. Meanwhile, downtown, artists and writers and other denizens of bohemia whooped it up, enjoying a liberated existence of self-expression, which often included freedom from hot water or electricity.

Jumping ahead in time — to the roaring whatever-we-call-this-decade — we find that all is changed, changed utterly. Today, the elite is a meritocracy with no use for WASP reserve or vital debutante statistics. Its money and power come from brains, not ancestry. To acquire this status, and to manifest it, members of the new ruling class reject all the boring old virtues of stability, regularity and conformity. They are wild and crazy guys. And gals, too, of course. This cohort is post-feminist, post-modernist, post-everything.

The socio-economic impact has been tremendous — and not just for the man in the gray flannel suit, now compelled to bungee jump. In the information economy, intellectuals are all entrepreneurs, and vice versa. Creativity is the name of the game. And its only rule is that (as a fast-food chains instructs us in its ads) "Sometimes You've Gotta Break the Rules."

The boboisie is the cause of all these changes. Or perhaps their by-product. It isn't too clear which; and insofar as Bobos in Paradise addresses that puzzle, the answer is "Whatever." Bourgeois bohemia includes, in Brooks's estimate, "about nine million households with incomes of over $100,000" — what he calls "the most vocal and active portion of the population." Just how they relate to the rest of society, those above and those below, is not really the author's concern.

Rather, he focuses on the quirks and consumption habits of the most powerful and trend-setting caste. The product is, in effect, a very long magazine article on the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (Ivy League division). Brooks counts himself as a bobo; and while tongue may be planted quite visibly in his cheek, social criticism this isn't. He writes about his peers with a certain affection, if not exactly admiration, in tones of unrelentingly puckish humor.

Which has the important effect of obscuring what goes on between the lines. "Bobos" is a catchy neologism that will, with luck, die swiftly; yet the phenomenon itself predates this monicker. For example, Paul Fussell sketched the bobos as "the X people" in the final pages of Class (1983) — a funny but more tough-minded book, lacking cuteness.

But to see the context of Bobos in Paradise, you have to look further back in time. Like any writer for the Weekly Standard, Brooks must know that the bobosie is just another name for "the New Class." That quasi-Marxist expression emerged in the late 1930s and got hijacked by the right in the '70s. It refers to those experts, technicians, bureaucrats, and brain-workers who, while vital to the functioning of an advanced industrial society, do not necessarily regard themselves as having the same interests as business owners. Their power comes from the knowledge and/or access to media.

Many neoconservatives regarded the sixties as the dreadful moment when the New Class embraced the counterculture — rejecting ambition, individualism, profit-minded discipline, and sundry other Ben Franklin virtues. There were undermining the West. If they kept it up Soviet tanks would eventually roll down Main Street, cheered on by hordes of welfare mothers and militant homosexuals. Of course, the neoconservatives, who worked mostly as journalists and academics, were members of the New Class themselves, but never mind.

David Brooks belongs to the latest generation of this group; and Bobos in Paradise is, in part, addressed to his elders. The chapter on bobo intellectuals (neocon and otherwise) is particularly telling. Brooks makes clear just how much steak and gravy are available to New Class members who, as the saying has it, "go along to get along." As for the notion that they have any interest in biting the hand that feeds them — it is to laugh. They embody no values at odds with the existing order of things, and in fact provide many useful services to the empire.

As an afterthought, Brooks wonders if this might change. "Indeed," he writes, "it's possible to imagine a coming generation that will grow bored of our reconciliations, our pragmatic ambivalence, our tendency to lead lives half one thing, half another. They may long for a little cleansing purity, a little zeal in place of our materialism, demanding orthodoxy in place of our small-scale morality."

Brooks puts all this in parentheses, and never mentions it again. The prospect is not very worrisome. In dealing with the New Class (he suggests) the best policy is one of indulgent good humor. The new code of hipster gentility means that the closest they will come to upheaval is redecorating. So Brooks winks at the old ideological warriors, saying, Now let us do a little happy dance.