Transaction Man

The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

By: Nicholas Lemann

Narrated by: Chris Ciulla, Nicholas Lemann

2019 Amazon.com Best Books of the Year

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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Nicholas Lemann (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

Meandering story of some important history

The core concept is the nature of the firms, or nowadays, platforms around which mass business and social lives are arrayed. Parts of this are touched on elsewhere (and I think, with better focus, if narrower scope) in the books (with audios available here) The Myth of the Rational Market and Bloodsport. This book wanders back and forth across the line, unable seemingly to decide whether it is a series of personal-interest stories or an ideas book. Maybe the author is trying to be somewhat like Michael Lewis, who has honed the art to wide popularity. I would rate this book as having done an OK job on both aspects, but with major defects touched on below. At the start I was thrilled to see it, as it is a summary of the books of my most intense interest over the last 10 years. It is right in my wheelhouse, as focusing on topics I think of highest importance. For all that, it still seems a little loose for my taste, seeming to wander into very anecdotal tangents.

Rather than laying out a disciplined logical structure and history of the subject, the author gets into side-stories and loses track, a few times completely. The bio of Michael Jensen, for example, would better have spent more of its time on his worthwhile ideas (useful for mapping things out whether you agree with his extremely transactional views or not), rather than the perhaps more popularly engrossing tale of his lark in the spacy personal questing-seminar sort of industry, which I see only as a reflection of his losing his intellectual edge and falling into navel-gazing. Jensen's character flaws are way off the point, in my opinion. Indeed, in the hands of this author, the pure "Transaction Man" (Jensen) becomes a bit laughable (to some), a straw man, given his later strange ramblings (thinking he discovered and is the avatar of "integrity", to my mind perhaps unconsciously cannibalizing and repackaging bits of the Catholic ethics of his childhood) in a setting of peddling carney-huckster self-discovery seminars. All I see here is Jensen falling apart and undergoing a cheesy conversion experience of a type readily available on every corner in the Bay Area of the time (like cheap soap-flakes), perfect for a nerdy egomaniac to fall into, tghe moment when he finally got his nose out of a book, with himself supposedly reborn but in the spotlight as always, as the great prophet. It is for me a sad coda to his moments of genius. Jensen's best ideas are not well fleshed-out here, and the central bio of this book as a result is too distracted and quirky-entertaining. This sideshow the author can misuse to discredit the better features of the Chicago School and its still-useful, if flawed, concepts for framing incentives in business entities and dealings (which have not gone away, despite the author's shoehorning history into his big labels). A little bit of personalizing spice is nice, and sells books I suppose, and here we tend to get an excess, and occasionally, buckets of it. My complaint overall would be, similarly, at the expense of the core ideas, the things labeled here as distinct Institutions, Transactions, and Networks, were all, always, each of those three things, and still are. It is not like one appeared and became extinct and the other arrived (though this labeling has some utility). The conceptualizing around that is mushy, for me. It doesn't really penetrate to where I would like to see this line of thought going, to be truly, deeply influential. For me the book doesn't pierce deep enough beyond its "popular nonfiction book" labels into the underlying ideas. But, it is not useless. Few have focused on this in a popular book, and this one has its virtues as a basic review of (at least a taste of) high-level views of organizations since the Crash of '29. It sticks well enough to its knitting to be worthwhile for me, though parts are very marginal. As for the narration, the warmed-over and informal tone is a semi-poor fit, but it is competent and reasonably listenable.

Maybe the title's an overreach? Excellent though!

First, this book is well written (Mr. Lemann's a longtime writer for The New Yorker and dean of an ivy league english program and he's expert at constructing beautiful sentences which are a joy to read). And, as always, Mr. Lemann is trying to say something interesting here. The detail and specificity of the case histories he uses help to illuminate the bigger theme of the book. But it sometimes feels slightly unfocussed and unfinished, like a late draft, a stack of an excellent pages that's getting close to great in its journey from writer to editor and back again, rather than the finished book. The final chapter feels overly ambitious and, admirably, seems to try to pull together more than what may actually be in the body of the book.

Second, Mr. Ciulla's narration--always a tough thing on which to comment because of its subjectivity--sometimes feels smarmy and overly 'knowing'(?), overly... familiar (is that too old fashioned a characterization?). And, in his reading, he doesn't always seem to distinguish a comma from a period (or maybe it's just a simple lack of familiarity with the material he's narrating and he's winging it a bit too much?) and this is occasionally confusing (like this review?) and may, in some small way, hurt the credibility of the book. But narration is probably the most subjective part of any audiobook, so go figure. I much prefer the author's narration at the start and finish of the book.

But finally this is a serious book meant to be read, as a book, not to be listened to in this, admittedly, half-assed way and my impression of the book probably has more to do with that (being too lazy to sit down and actually read it properly like a book--a behavior and habit symptomatic of one of the larger themes generally cited as contributing to cultural decline in this book) than any faults of the book.

This book is about interesting and vital things. I'd recommend it!