It is now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker, but it isn't just a matter of style. If you investigate people's attitudes towards sex, morality, leisure time and work, it is getting harder and harder to separate the anti-establishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man. Most people seemed to have rebel attitudes and social-climbing attitudes all scrambled together.

These Bobos are just normal middle-class people who are living out a protracted adolescence. Their political interests are either 'intensely close and personal' (abortion or gun control), or very remote (the rainforests, Tibet or Third World poverty). But they will most likely express their conscience in their consumerism, relieved to be helping someone somewhere by collecting the hand-carved artifacts of distant cultures.

Motivated by spiritual participation, but cautious of moral crusades and religious enthusiasms, they tolerate a little lifestyle experimentation, so long as it is done safely and moderately. They are offended by concrete wrongs, such as cruelty and racial injustice, but are relatively unmoved by lies or transgressions that don't seem to do anyone any obvious harm.

It is an elite that has been raised to oppose elites. They are by instinct anti-establishmentarian, yet in some sense they have become a new establishment. They are prosperous without seeming greedy; they have pleased their elders, without seeming conformists; they have risen toward the top without too obviously looking down on those below.

While bemoaning the Bobo's 'boring politics', the Bobos are an elite superior to their intolerant and warring predecessors -they've certainly made shopping more fun, and they have a good morality for building a decent society.