This book came out in the mid 90s and it predicted the mess we are confronting right now.
The Amazon link is here for more information.
money insulates them, much more than it used to, from the common life. The "routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart" strikes Kaus as an ominous development. So does their own "smug contempt for the demographically inferior." Part of the trouble, I would add, is that we have lost our respect for honest manual labor. We think of "creative" work as a series of abstract mental operations performed in an office, preferably with the aid of computers, not as the production of food, shelter, and other necessities. The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life-hence their feeble attempt to compensate by embracing a strenuous regimen of gratuitous exercise. Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality-"hyperreality," as it has been called-as distinguished from the palpable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in the "social construction of reality"-the central dogma of postmodernist thought-reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency-against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life-the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.