The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment

by Charles R. Morris

Throughout the twentieth century New York City has been the center for the liberal impulse in America. In the 1960s New York moved squarely centerstage with expansive antipoverty programs, generous welfare and housing supports, a rapidly expanding university system, massive free health care--until the liberal government collapses under all this weight in the financial debacle of 1975. This book is about public policy making in New York during the zenith of the great liberal experiment, from 1960, Mayor Robert Wagner's third term, through John V. Lindsay, Abraham Beame, and, finally, to Edward Koch and the inevitable return of fiscal conservatism. The bigger they come the harder they fall. When New York City fell and its intricate, often exotic, budget gimmickry came unstuck, they foundations of every other large city in America shook. If we are not to relive this history it is important to learn the lessons taught so cogently and entertainingly in this book.

Genres: History, Urbanism, Politics

260 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1980

About the author

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Charles R. Morris

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about New York City's descent into financial default during the 1960s and 70s by a former senior administrator in the Mayor Lindsay administration, yet this book is not a memoir or a tell-all screed. Almost all it is based on published sources with just the most minute additions from the author's personal experience. And, despite the title, it is not an damning indictment of the Lindsay administration or its policies. Morris is certainly willing to point to some of the shortfalls of Lindsay's mayoralty (such as the ridiculous collective bargaining policies that continually ratcheted wages up by promising all municipal unions stable "differentials" with other workers (so if sanitation got a 20% raise, policemen would get a 25% raise, and police sergeants and their union would get an even greater increase)), yet he is also quick to point out how successful some of the mayor's "productivity" reforms were, especially in the second administration, where police and fire districts were redrawn with the help of RAND and McKinsey management specialists, and welfare centers were redesigned for more efficient processing, among other reforms. He also shows convincingly that for all Lindsay's financial profligacy, he was actually fairly typical for late-60s, early 70s U.S. mayors, and on some measures spending increases in New York were less than the national average during his years.

Morris traces most of the city's problems to abstruse accounting gimmicks (used mainly to work around the state's constitutional limits on debt) and deficit financing. In Morris's telling, the city could have avoided its debt restructuring if it had just played the numbers right and worked on long-term instead of short-term notes. Plausible, although certainly not the whole story. Vincent Cannato's book "The Ungovernable City" about the Lindsay administration gives the more damning side to this tale, and, I must say, is more coherent and better written than much of this work.