The Gilded Age and Progressive Era14 Jan

112: The Menance of Prosperity

In this episode of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast, Boyd Cothran speaks with historian Daniel Wortel-London about his new book, The Menace of Prosperity, a sweeping history of New York City and the political economy of urban growth from the aftermath of the Civil War through the late twentieth century.

The conversation centres on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, when New York’s leaders increasingly tied the city’s finances to real estate development, municipal debt, and rising property values. Wortel-London introduces two key concepts—social costs and fiscal imaginaries—to explain how elite-driven prosperity repeatedly generated fiscal crises, inequality, and instability, even as critics advanced alternative visions rooted in cooperation, public ownership, and democratic control of urban resources.

Along the way, Boyd and Daniel discuss the 1870s fiscal crisis and fears of “monstrous growth,” Gilded Age fiscal radicals and the cooperative commonwealth, Henry George and the single tax, Progressive Era debates over municipal ownership and planning, and interwar struggles over housing and economic stabilization. The episode concludes by tracing how these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century choices shaped the New Deal, the 1970s fiscal crisis, and contemporary debates over housing, development, and inequality in New York.

The Menace of Prosperity is available from the University of Chicago Press

Contact the host:

Boyd Cothran can be reached at cothran@yorku.ca

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