Burns's New York Documentary Misattributes the City's Revival to Globalized Finance and Obscures the Political Choices Behind Deindustrialization
Source: Daniel Wortel-London. "Financial Capital Didn’t Make New York City Great." October 27, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author says the documentary tells a feel-good story in which New York was saved by Wall Street and globalization. He argues that city leaders deliberately pushed out manufacturing and favored finance, which helped cause the crisis and weakened democratic control. In his view, the documentary treats this as inevitable and ignores the losses and inequality it produced.
Conclusion
Ric Burns's documentary wrongly frames New York's post-1970s redemption as dependent on courting globalized finance; in truth, financialization was a set of political choices that eroded the city's industrial base and democratic control over the economy, and it now threatens the pluralism and liberal values the film credits it with sustaining.
Premises
- The documentary blames deindustrialization on impersonal, inevitable globalization, but postwar city leaders and planning bodies actively chose to displace manufacturing in favor of finance and information services.
- Financialization accompanied and accelerated the loss of manufacturing rather than following it, so the 1970s fiscal crisis was exacerbated, and possibly partly caused, by local choices and the growth of the financial sector.
- The post-crisis austerity regime imposed by bankers and businessmen was not just fiscal relief but an effort to dismantle a model in which the economy was subordinate to democracy, and it led to decay in public services and a rise in crime.
- The documentary hedges or offsets critical evidence and omits left-wing voices and popular struggles (unions, tenant organizers), so it presents adaptation to globalized capital as the only path (there was no alternative).
- The documentary credits Wall Street, policing, and figures like Bloomberg for the city's revival, while giving little weight to immigrants and ordinary New Yorkers and underexploring how neoliberal technocracy and a militarized police state conflict with the city's pluralistic self-image.
Assumptions
- Historical outcomes like deindustrialization and the fiscal crisis were contingent on political choices, not determined by global forces.
- Jane Jacobs, Joshua Freeman, Kim Phillips-Fein and similar sources are more reliable than the documentary's chosen commentators.
- Democratic control over the economy is a core value that a fair account of the city's history should weigh heavily.
- Contemporary globalized finance is incompatible with, or a threat to, urban pluralism and inequality-reducing liberal values.
- A documentary's framing and selection of voices can be assessed as an argument with a distinct thesis.