Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
Written by Nicholas Lemann
Narrated by Nicholas Lemann and Chris Ciulla
()
About this audiobook
This program includes a prologue and epilogue read by the author.
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—with enormous consequences for all of us.
Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Lemann, born in New Orleans in 1954, began his journalistic career there and then worked at Washington Monthly, Washington Post, and Texas Monthly, of which he was executive editor. A frequent contributor to national magazines, he was national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly and is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include the prizewinning The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991).
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