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

Kim Phillips-Fein revisits New York City's 1970s fiscal crisis not as a local budgeting problem but as a foundational moment in the rise of modern austerity politics. Her book shows how bankers, technocrats, and political elites redefined the relationship between democracy and public finance. What emerges is a gripping story of who gets to govern a city and in whose interests. Phillips-Fein is excellent at making bureaucratic power visible. She traces how abstract financial decisions translated into real consequences for workers, public institutions, and urban life. The book also serves as an origin story for neoliberal assumptions that now feel commonplace. It is rigorously researched, but never inert. The drama lies in the struggle over public goods, labor, and the meaning of crisis itself. This is a history of turning points, but also of language: how "responsibility" and "discipline" became tools of political transformation. Sharp, timely, and highly clarifying.