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Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of great wealth has coincided with the fraying of social ties and the rise of inequality. How did all this come about?
In “Transaction Man”, Nicholas Lemann explains the United States', and the world's, great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras. Adolf Berle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's chief theorist of the economy, imagined a society dominated by large corporations, which a newly powerful federal government had forced to become benign and stable institutions, contributing to the public good by offering stable employment and generous pensions. By the 1970s, the corporations' large stockholders grew restive under this regime, and their chief theoretician, Harvard Business School's Michael Jensen, insisted that firms should maximize shareholder value, whatever the consequences. Today, Silicon Valley titans such as the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman hope "networks" can reknit our social fabric.
Lemann interweaves these fresh and vivid profiles with a history of the Morgan Stanley investment bank from the 1930s through the financial crisis of 2008, while also tracking the rise and fall of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and the family-run car dealerships at its heart. Incisive and sweeping, “Transaction Man” is the definitive account of the reengineering of America and the enormous impact it has had on us all.
In “Transaction Man”, Nicholas Lemann explains the United States', and the world's, great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras. Adolf Berle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's chief theorist of the economy, imagined a society dominated by large corporations, which a newly powerful federal government had forced to become benign and stable institutions, contributing to the public good by offering stable employment and generous pensions. By the 1970s, the corporations' large stockholders grew restive under this regime, and their chief theoretician, Harvard Business School's Michael Jensen, insisted that firms should maximize shareholder value, whatever the consequences. Today, Silicon Valley titans such as the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman hope "networks" can reknit our social fabric.
Lemann interweaves these fresh and vivid profiles with a history of the Morgan Stanley investment bank from the 1930s through the financial crisis of 2008, while also tracking the rise and fall of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and the family-run car dealerships at its heart. Incisive and sweeping, “Transaction Man” is the definitive account of the reengineering of America and the enormous impact it has had on us all.
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Reviews
"Lemann has been one of our wisest, clearest-thinking, and most learned commentators on American society since he began his journalism career at Washington Monthly in the 1970s. His books (The Promised Land, The Big Test, Redemption) all tackle moments of sweeping social transformation, offering compelling studies of the interrelation of ideas and institutions grounded in the experience of ordinary people. Transaction Man, which tracks how the United States went from a largely Polanyian society to one defined by ideas like Friedman's, is his best"
and most sweeping
"Compelling and well reported . . . [Lemann brings] historical perspective to the changing role of economists in American society."
Paul Romer, Foreign Affairs
"Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has a skill for making grand stories about American life feel human. He did it in two earlier books, The Promised Land, his 1991 account of the great black migration, and The Big Test, about the SAT and meritocracy, which was published in 1999. Anyone who read those books when they appeared would have been better prepared for some of the political and cultural debates that followed."
David Leonhardt, The New York Times Book Review