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Nonfiction

A History of Bloomberg’s Successes and Failures

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2013.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

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BLOOMBERG
A Billionaire’s Ambition
By Chris McNickle
444 pp. Skyhorse. $27.99.

Michael Bloomberg ended up running the information technology department at Salomon Brothers partly as a punishment. It was 1979, and he had already had a highly successful 13-year career at the firm, after joining it out of Harvard Business School. But he had also made enemies. The other Salomon partners decided to put him in charge of a department that “was a critical function to be sure,” as Chris McNickle writes in “Bloomberg: A Billionaire’s Ambition,” “but far removed from the glory of the trades and the deals that made the firm money.” Two years later, they eased him out of the company, albeit with a $10 million goodbye.

Information technology was a good fit for Bloomberg. He had always liked data and analysis. As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1960s, he first planned to be a physics major before switching to electrical engineering. The experience of running Salomon’s technology department underscored to him how valuable data could be. It also made him think there was a business opportunity: giving people on Wall Street better information than they had. Bloomberg believed more numbers and facts would allow traders to make better decisions. They, in turn, would pay handsomely for the information.

And so he founded a company that made computers designed to fit on a trader’s desk, which wasn’t easy in the bulky computing days of the early 1980s. “The Bloombergs,” as they were known, provided traders with information about the bond market. Eventually, the company grew far beyond the bond market and made Bloomberg a billionaire, the richest man in New York.

His belief in the power of information has remained the closest thing to an unshakable ideology for Bloomberg. As New York’s mayor for 12 years, he tried to use data, facts and analysis to transform an enormous, dynamic city.

He famously got rid of most offices at City Hall, sitting in open cubicles alongside his aides (as he had at his company) largely so that he and they both would be in the midst of an information flow. Upon taking office, he was aghast to discover that no one could tell him how many people worked for the City of New York; his staff soon changed that, creating a registry of city workers. In one area after another — the use of the waterfront, the zoning of buildings, public health, transportation and, most famously, policing and schools — Bloomberg used information as his primary tool of governance. As one poverty expert said, Bloomberg tried to “build a culture of evidence.”

Bloomberg’s mayoralty began less than four months after 9/11 and spanned most of the presidencies of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as the worst financial crisis in 70 years. Bloomberg has been out of office less than a full term, and yet his tenure already seems in some ways to be out of another time.

Republicans (he joined the party to win the mayor’s office, before abandoning it) show little interest in his fact-based approach to government. The party nominated a compulsive liar for president, and its congressional leaders tried to pass a major health care bill based on fictions. Party leaders now regularly attempt to deny basic facts, whether they come from climate scientists or the dispassionate analysts at the Congressional Budget Office.

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Democrats remain much closer to Bloomberg’s technocratic vision of government as a force for good, but their energy has also shifted. Nothing represents the change better than Bloomberg’s own successor, Bill de Blasio. He is arguably the most proudly left-wing government executive in the United States. He won in large part by casting Bloomberg as insufficiently concerned about the gaping inequality that afflicts both New York and the country. Populism is in. Bloombergism seems quaint.

McNickle, a lifelong New Yorker who has a doctorate in history and spent years working in finance, has done something valuable with this biography. He has focused on Bloomberg’s 12 years as mayor and tried to offer an early historical judgment on them. The book lacks the narrative panache and fresh detail of some political histories. The 2009 book “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics,” written by my former Times colleague Joyce Purnick, has a more accessible pacing, for example. McNickle, however, has the advantage of being able to cover all three of Bloomberg’s terms rather than only the first two, and he proves to be an excellent judge.

He scrupulously allows both Bloomberg’s circle and his critics to have their say. But McNickle doesn’t leave the reader feeling helpless among conflicting evidence. He avoids the nihilist trap that causes so many journalistic assessments of politicians to be unsatisfying. He instead is willing to offer perspective about the scale of failures and successes. He ends his chapters, each of which focuses on a major subject, by making an argument about what worked, what didn’t and what mattered most.

McNickle is withering about Bloomberg’s deal with the City Council — “a crass marriage of ambitions” — to change the term-limits law so that he could serve a third term. McNickle also recognizes that Bloomberg’s election and re-elections depended on his personal wealth, which in turn “made a farce” of the campaign-finance law. This book lays out various policy mistakes and disappointments, like the damage from stop-and-frisk policing and the mixed record of Bloomberg’s educational policies.

Yet the full picture is rather different, and McNickle doesn’t shy from it either. Bloomberg was a remarkably successful mayor. He succeeded in large part because of his faith in the power of facts. He sought detailed, reliable information about life in the city. He asked his aides to focus on big questions and charged them with improving New Yorkers’ lives.

They did. They remade New York’s once grim waterfront, transforming the face of the city. They won a huge public-health victory by restricting smoking and made more progress than many people realize on obesity. Bloomberg rewrote archaic zoning laws, so they were no longer based on the notion that factories and residences were the main uses for New York’s real estate; offices, retail and public parks were vital too. The Bronx Terminal Market, Hunters Point in Queens and the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn are all examples. He presided over a decline in both crime and the jail population. The poverty rate fell relative to the rest of the country’s. His schooling reforms fell short of what he wanted, but McNickle shows they were also responsible for real improvements.

The most resonant critique of Bloomberg, de Blasio’s central critique, is that he governed for the 1 percent rather than the 99 percent. It’s certainly the case that the rich did better than everyone else over the course of his mayoralty. But that’s a global story, not just a New York one. While Bloomberg didn’t solve the great stagnation of living standards that afflicts the American middle class and poor, it’s hard to think of a contemporary mayor or governor who made more progress.

The problem of inequality may well be too big for only a technocratic approach to government. It will probably also require muscular federal action on areas like taxes, antitrust, and workers’ bargaining power. But Bloomberg nonetheless leaves a giant legacy for anyone who cares about the power of government to do good. When future fact-loving politicians take office — and they will, even in Washington — they will be able to learn from both Bloomberg’s successes and his shortcomings.

David Leonhardt is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Mayor Mike and His Data. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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