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Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream Hardcover – September 10, 2019
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An Amazon Best History Book of 2019
"A splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people." ―Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly
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.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateSeptember 10, 2019
- Dimensions6.36 x 1.06 x 9.58 inches
- ISBN-100374277885
- ISBN-13978-0374277888
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Get to know this book
What's it about?
This book is about the transformation of the United States and the world by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras.Amazon editors say...
Paints a portrait of a modern-day Midas who remade markets but failed to anticipate the impacts on his firm and his country.
Chris Schluep, Amazon Editor
Editorial Reviews
Review
"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―yet." ―Rick Perlstein, The Nation
"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
"Lemann . . . [reminds] us that Transaction Man and his economist allies were not always ascendant, and that they won’t necessarily remain so . . . [an] elegant history." ―Sebastian Mallaby, The Atlantic
"Clearly, something has happened to make us sour on the American corporation . . . Exactly what went wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man . . . Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing." ―Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly
"[Lemann] is clearly well-versed in the financial, economic, and political histories of his Institution and Transaction Men . . . [his] writing . . . might be essential." ―Bradley Babendir, NPR
"Ingenious and colorful . . . There are dazzling passages . . . Gems are dug from the past." ―The Economist
"Transaction Man anchors three periods of American capitalism to mini-bios of New Deal brain-truster Adolf Berle, conservative economist Michael Jensen, and LinkedIn tech guru Reid Hoffman . . . [performs] the impressive feat of elucidating complex and significant developments in under 400 lively pages." ―Robert Christgau, Bookforum
"The most ambitious, well-researched, and readable account of 20th-century U.S. political economy I’ve come across." ―Don Chew, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance
"[An] excellent and unusually framed economic history . . . This concise and cogent history of the theories that have transformed the American economy makes a potentially dry subject fascinating." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A fresh account of the magnitude of inequality in America and how it came to be . . . Lemann relies on his well-developed skills as a longtime journalist to weave the specific and the abstract into a narrative that is intellectually challenging." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Through the stories of individuals, often from varied neighborhoods, businesses, and corporations, Lemann makes these experiences come alive . . . [an] insightful business history." ―Library Journal
"A thorough, impressive and hard look at the American economy and the people who most influenced its arrival in the present moment." ―Literary Hub
“With his characteristic fluidity of thought and of expression, Nicholas Lemann has written a powerful book about how America really works―and doesn’t. Part history, part reportage, part argument, “Transaction Man” is original, compelling, and illuminating.” ―Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America
“This fascinating book is destined to become our era’s most important and insightful explanation of the deep forces disrupting our economy. Nicholas Lemann uses compelling stories of real people combined with brilliant analysis to show how the rules that shape our lives have changed. The author's narrative is riveting and convincing ― as is his call for a renewed American pluralism. His new way of thinking about our past and present leads to a new way of thinking about the future we want. If you want to read one book to understand America today, this is it.” ―Walter Isaacson, author of Leonardo da Vinci and The Innovators
"A brilliant, essential, and rollicking read. Nicholas Lemann deftly guides the reader on a fascinating excursion through some of the last century’s densest Big Idea terrain. Blending incisive commentary with deliciously salacious detail, Transaction Man thrums with whiz-kid New Dealers and post-war management gurus, New Age Svengalis and Great Recession financial prestidigitators, free-market mavens and Silicon Valley techno-titans–and the soaring and all-too-frequently silly nostrums with which they have tried to jacket the blooming, buzzing confusion of the modern world." ―David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Freedom from Fear
"Every so often there comes along a book that forces you to reconsider what you thought you knew. Nick Lemann’s Transaction Man is one of these books. Focusing our attention on short-term visionaries and disrupters, activist professors, rogue economists, and Silicon Valley lifers, Lemann revisits and revitalizes the economic history of America since the New Deal." ―David Nasaw, author of The Patriarch
“Brilliant and incisive, Transaction Man illuminates America’s economic history through colorful stories of the thinkers whose ideas, often stubbornly held, benefited a succession of wealthy elites while failing ordinary people who were diligently trying to earn a living. For anyone who thinks Wall Street has too much power, this book explains how that power grew. Nicholas Lemann brings needed clarity and human interest to an essential topic of our time: who should make the rules for the financial system?” ―Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School, Founding Chair and Director of the Harvard Advanced leadership Initiative, and best-selling author
"Through a deft interweaving of key ideas from thought leaders, the playing out of large-scale social and economic forces, and accounts of the lives of ordinary citizens, Lemann brilliantly illuminates the course of the United States during the last 100 years." ―Howard Gardner, Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and other books
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Product details
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (September 10, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0374277885
- ISBN-13 : 978-0374277888
- Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.36 x 1.06 x 9.58 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,047,602 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,020 in Sociology of Class
- #1,628 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
- #2,062 in Economic History (Books)
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Customers find the writing style beautifully told and packed with important historical perspective on fundamental contemporary themes. They also describe the content as informative, interesting, and the most important book they've read since Guns Germs.
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Customers find the writing style beautifully told, rich in stories, insights, and worldviews. They also say the book is packed with important historical perspective on fundamental contemporary themes.
"...This is a remarkable tale of the nation’s loss of faith in each of the three successive, particularly American, ideologies that came to dominate our..." Read more
"Rich in stories, insights and worldview. I would have loved this book even more had there been even more of it...." Read more
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This is a remarkable tale of the nation’s loss of faith in each of the three successive, particularly American, ideologies that came to dominate our political-economic landscape between the great depression era and today.
The story is a journalistic history told through the influence of a major contributor to the rise of each cycle, who in each case is known almost exclusively to insiders. It’s also the story of the price paid by the everyday people affected by the collateral damage of each cycle, told through the collapse of a singe mid-western town at the epicenter and through the eyes of individuals who strive to cope through the deterioration of their opportunities in employment, housing, neighborhoods, personal safety and ultimately their American dreams.
For illuminating today’s headline dilemmas – like the hollowing out of the middle class, the newly debatable responsibilities of corporations, the modern financial system taunting deeper and more frequent recessions, the potential breakup of the till recently sacred internet giants – Lemann’s insights provide much needed perspective, researched and beautifully told without the skewing of either political party’s media.
While snapshots and sound bites from each major ideological cycle may be familiar, the connective tissue between the rolling rise and fall of one into the next and the consequences are missing perspectives from our public forums. Even harder to unearth are the pathologies these ideologies share in common. Without recognizing them, we’re setting ourselves up for continued cycles of similar prescriptions featuring the seductive promise to be the single best answer for all Americans.
In Lemann’s telling each ideology examined is self-assured of its unbridled universal value and unaware of its unintended consequences for the victims of its destruction and exclusions. He calls upon James Madison, John Dewey and others to suggest there may be no such thing as a solution to our major problems good for everyone. Economic ideology itself may be the underlying problem. Then what to do? Where to from here?
Lemann’s best hunch appears in the Afterward. It’s an intriguing idea, worthy of an equally well-developed sequel. It’s not new nor an ideology but a process, one given short shrift in our time. It reads more plausibly as you reap the lessons from the body of the book.
One ‘trouble’ with the author’s handling of so complex a theme is that its individual chapters are so engagingly told, through so many vivid sketches, it’s easy to lose sight of the threads that connect them and bind the whole. Even recent newspaper reviewers seem pleasantly distracted.
Lemann is a superb storyteller. Any reader may be forgiven for enjoying the leading characters, their exploits and miscalculations, to a degree that misses the caliber of his underlying analysis of our fundamental discontents. Savor these connections as well, to approach our current dilemmas in a clearer light.
Thomas W. Moloney
Whether you agree that the three fundamental transitions he describes are fundamentally accurate and true phase shifts, there is no doubt he is correct than the American business and economic worlds are far different from what they were 100 years ago or at various other points along the way. How much that was driven by technology, social change, politics and countless other major factors has been debated fiercely and will continue to be. This book is a welcome addition of storytelling and analysis.
The thread about Adolf Berle did not quite resonate with me because I never got that interested in Berle's story as a person or how much credit he deserved. I wished for somewhat bit more straightforward historical reporting and less personal history, although after getting through the rest of the book, I saw that the approach was important for the other sections and thus was necessary here, too. The content about institutions vs government, etc., was otherwise excellent and he presented a solid case.
The shift to transactions as the central theme is perhaps more controversial, in a leaner world driven by other priorities and ruthless international competition, as well as financial sophistication and, yes, manipulation. In stories such as these, we always read about the decline of unions and pensions, as if they had been around for a long time, when of course they had not and most people never had them anyway, and as if they were naturally sustainable in a globalized market. At the end, I wasn't sure what the author thought would solve that - perhaps I wasn't sharp enough - even in his strong call (pleading?) for pluralism and his inherent assumption that inequality is something that must be fixed and can be fixed.
The trend to networking as in modern social media and with Reid Hoffman as a highlighted figure might be a bit early for the book, as we are still in the relatively early stages. Some of the impact is quite clear and highly disruptive to old models, whereas the long-term result is fuzzy. There's always something else to follow, isn't there? In this case, the technology is so advanced and pervasive, what might that be? The author seems to me to argue at times that institutions are less powerful, and that is true for some perspectives (e.g., decline in loyalty, decline in traditional media), yet we are faced daily with arguments about the power of the large tech firms. And who can argue that government is smaller and less pervasive / invasive than it was at any point in the past 100 years? That perhaps could have used more attention.