Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

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Description

An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster―and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today

When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was once getting ready to fiscal collapse, few believed it was once imaginable. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was once indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was once unworkable. The city had to slash products and services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue.

In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and abnormal citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against every other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York―and reshaped ideas about government across The usa.

At once a sweeping history of one of the crucial most tumultuous times in New York’s past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is very important reading for anyone seeking to keep in mind the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.

Fear City is one of Publishers Weekly‘s Top 10 Best Books of 2017

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