While I would agree with your observation that everyone in New York is some sort of minority, and that the city has overall ambitions that are much more varied

While I would agree with your observation that everyone in New York is some sort of minority, and that the city has overall ambitions that are much more varied and interesting than simply "you should make more money," I do think that sentiment is a pretty strong undercurrent in Manhattan. I recently began taking night classes at an art school there, hoping to get away from the obsession with earning more that I felt surrounded by, but on the first night of class, I was bitterly disappointed. The instructor spends his day working for Morgan Stanley, and talks about it often; the general population of the class immediately lost all interest in me when they learned that I'm not currently employed. Overall, I would say that New York has an abundance of different ambitions, but most of them are permeated by a vaguely corporate insistence on caring about getting richer.