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Podcast: In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Episode: Benjamin Holtzman, "The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Description: In the 1960s and 1970s, New York City was beset by a host of fiscal and social crises wrought by white flight, federal and state disinvestment, and a declining tax base. The city faced rising crime, dilapidated parks and transit, skyrocketing budget deficits, deteriorating public services, and a dysfunctional and eviscerated municipal bureaucracy. By the mid-1970s, the situation was so dire that financial institutions refused to underwrite municipal bonds and the city faced bankruptcy. The response was a shift towards privatization and neoliberalization – a process that scholars have traditionally associated with political and financial elites. But Benjamin Holtzman’s The Lo...