If slicked-back, bespoke, Reaganite Wall Street was regarded as the economy’s savior after the ’70s, the correlation now, after George W. Bush, the financial crisis and years of the global war on terrorism, would be Barack Obama’s Silicon Valley, whose digital gold rush beckons creative young minds with bedhead under hoodies.

The tech sector and 21st-century entrepreneurship serve as another cover and proxy for yuppiedom. When the Venn diagram intersects, we revere their leaders almost like movie stars (indeed, they are often portrayed by them — in the case of Steve Jobs, two times in three years). In a 2014 survey of 15,000 millennials by the firm Collegefeed, 11 of the top 12 companies they most wanted to work for were tech outfits.

While there is certainly something more admirable, and typically less noxious, about those who innovate ideas and services than those who place bets and structure deals, let’s call it what it is. No matter how fervently techies and entrepreneurs claim they want to “change the world” (see any episode of “Shark Tank”), far fewer of them would be in the disruption game if the potential profits weren’t world-changing as well. The lovable millennial bumblers on “Silicon Valley” may be scruffy and genuinely passionate about coding, but their goal — making money and leveraging power — is quintessentially yuppie, even if their social skills aren’t.

As for millennials, they have inherited an economy too fragile, and student loans too insurmountable, to enable their full-fledged yuppification. But they still share their ancestors’ love for conspicuous consumption (Instagram pictures of meals, parties and vacations) and toys (in lieu of expensive cars, real estate and artwork, the sleekly technological and more affordable plunder of Apple products and apps).

Then there’s the yuppie’s extended family: all insatiable consumers, just of different products. We have the gentrifier (read: typically white person), who has moved into an “up and coming” (read: historically nonwhite) neighborhood now that it has a Whole Foods; the metrosexual (a term that’s already become obsolete because it applies to such a broad spectrum), who tends to his appearance as obsessively as does Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho”; the “bro,” who has transitioned from the frat house to the sports bar, and his pumpkin-latte-sipping girlfriend; the foodie; the SoulCyclist or CrossFitter; and so on, until, finally and most confusingly, the hipster, which no one will admit being.

The hipster may seem to be the antithesis of the yuppie in his professional complacency, in his disdain for or ironic appropriation of everything mainstream. Yet all but the most bohemian of hipsters still relish the trappings of late capitalism, when he can get his hands on them: the designer jeans and Chuck Taylors, the small-batch bourbon and maple-marinated tempeh, the borrowed HBO Go password and cracked-screen iPhone. (All things I indulge in myself, although I’m certainly not a — whoops.) He’s simply less ambitious about obtaining them and more circumspect about signaling his desire for consumer goods: a yuppie in slacker’s thrift-store clothing.