Many of Brooks's turns of phrase are mordant and memorable. On the folkways of the old establishment: "There were local clubs where town fathers gathered to exchange ethnic jokes and dine on lamb chops topped with canned sauces." On the Bobo obsession with high-end stoves: "They want an oven capacity of 8 cubic feet minimum, just to show they are the sort of people who could roast a bison if necessary."

Yet for all of the book's fresh phrases, I couldn't help feeling a strange twinge of nostalgia. Brooks, I suspect, has described Bobos at their zenith -- which means that they now have nowhere to travel but down. And that may already be happening. The glory days of elite colleges, for example, are fading fast. Some of the brightest lights of the new economy -- Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and Steven Spielberg come to mind -- are college dropouts. And America's smartest teenagers are starting Web-based businesses instead of trying to ace their achievement tests. In the "What have you done for me lately?" new economy, where you matriculated as an 18-year-old matters far less than the sales of the last product that you shipped.

What's more, the meritocrats -- like most elites before them -- are showing signs of entrenchment. Despite their quasi-revolutionary lingo, many Bobos resist upsetting the status quo they dominate. As Brooks writes, "These are the kids who spent the crucial years between ages 16 and 24 winning the approval of their elders." They understandably believe in the rules that they have so adroitly mastered: Do your homework; get good grades; earn admission to a fancy college. Yet Thomas J. Stanley, in his blockbuster books, The Millionaire Next Door, coauthored with William D. Danko, and The Millionaire Mind, has shown an inverse correlation between conventional academic achievement and entrepreneurial success. People with high sat scores, it turns out, tend to be more risk-averse than the rest of the population.

Consider where the real innovations have come from during the last decade. Bobos may have used them, managed them, and profited from them, but they certainly didn't invent them. What fueled the Web in the mid-1990s were a few genuinely renegade, genuinely antiestablishment computer scientists and a few more artistic types who thought that what the computer scientists were doing was cool. I shudder to think how the Web would have evolved if we'd had a www.sat, or if entry into the Net economy depended on Bobo notions of "merit." Likewise, the most powerful cultural movement of the last decade -- one that has deeply imprinted entertainment, fashion, and even civic life -- has been hip-hop, a multibillion-dollar industry that has nothing to do with anything Bobo.

The people whom Peter Drucker called knowledge workers, Robert Reich called symbolic analysts, and David Brooks calls Bobos are today's emperors. But the sun may be setting on their reign. As knowledge and information become ubiquitous and free, as computers grow more capable of analytic work such as managing stock portfolios and making medical diagnoses, and as ever more computer programming migrates to places like India, the SAT elite may decline early in this century, much as the WASP elite withered at the end of the last one.

My guess is that in the Bobos' place will emerge a new elite composed not of knowledge workers but of artists. First came the aristocracy, an elite based on bloodline. Then came the meritocracy, an elite based on academic achievement. Next will be what I'd call an "artocracy," an elite based on mastery of visual arts, music, and drama -- the sorts of things that most high-achieving Bobos in the making disdained when they were in high school in favor of advanced-placement calculus. Someday soon, the data-manipulating, Ben & Jerry's-loving baby boomer with a $15,000 slate shower will give way to the unreconciled Bohemian.

Bobo, we hardly knew ye.

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