The long crisis : New York City and the path to neoliberalism
Benjamin Holtzman (Author)
"The Long Crisis explores the origins and implications of one of the most significant developments across the globe over the last fifty years: the diminished faith in government as capable of solving public problems. Conventional accounts of the shift toward market and private sector governing solutions have focused on the rising influence of conservatives, libertarians, and the business sector. The Long Crisis, however, locates the origins of this transformation in the efforts of city-dwellers to preserve liberal commitments of the postwar period. New York faced an economic crisis beginning in the late 1960s that disrupted long-standing assumptions about the services city government could provide. In response, New Yorkers—organized within block associations, nonprofits, and professional organizations—embraced an ethos of private volunteerism and, eventually, of partnership with private business in order to save their communities from neglect. Local liberal and Democratic officials came over time to see such alliances not as stopgap measures, but as legitimate and ultimately permanent features of modern governance. The ascent of market-based policies was driven less by a political assault of pro-market ideologues than by ordinary New Yorkers experimenting with novel ways to maintain robust public services in the face of the city’s budget woes. Local people and officials, The Long Crisis argues, built neoliberalism from the ground up. These shifts toward the market would both exacerbate old racial and economic inequalities and produce new ones that continue to shape metropolitan areas today"--Publisher's description
eBook, English, 2021
Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2021