Lemann has a skill for making grand stories about American life feel human ... One of the pleasures of this book is its accessible, succinct history of modern finance. 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. I suspect the same will be true of Transaction Man, given the present focus on economic inequality and corporate America’s role in creating it.

Transaction Man is recommended to anyone who got through the Great Recession without tackling any books about it. As unnatural as mathematical thinking may feel to the reading classes, the income-gap fault line plus the virtual kudzu of an internet that outstrips comprehension should be enough to convince the stubbornest humanist to watch the numbers, and Lemann provides an entry point ... [there are] fascinating figures who reward Lemann’s honed profiling skills ... As judicious as Lemann strives to be, we know where his heart is, especially given his accounts of three Chicagoans—an unflinchingly ethical white Buick dealer and two much poorer African Americans, a retired working mother and a community activist—victimized by financialization’s social costs ... It’s...hard to know how Lemann imagines pluralism might reassert itself in a post-we-hope transactional USA.

...[an] elegant history ... Lemann explores...the figure of Reid Hoffman, who founded the online professional network LinkedIn and is the third starring character in Lemann’s history of grand conceptions. It is an inspired piece of casting ... Lemann’s pluralism...prompts a deeper reservation. His vision frames politics as a zero-sum affair, dismissing as futile the quest for 'a broad, objectively determined meliorist plan that will help everyone.' But this postmodernist pessimism goes too far. Some policies are better than others, and to give up on this truth is to throw away the sharpest sword in the fight against inequality.

In Transaction Man, Lemann does a fine job of identifying and reporting the various strands of a narrative that he hoped would explain why 'the economy we have now is not doing a good job of generating . . . social trust, political calm, or widely shared prosperity.' But he never succeeds in weaving them together in a convincing, coherent story. The problem is not, as the author suggests, that Berle, Jensen, Hoffman and their contemporaries succumbed to 'conceptual grandeur.' They were merely part of the dynamic process by which every generation responds with ideas and policies to events and challenges, and even successful economic models atrophy and are replaced by something better. Rather, if anyone is guilty of conceptual overreach, it is Lemann himself.

There is much to enjoy in Transaction Man, not least Mr. Lemann’s sketches of the spectacularly self-confident Adolf Berle and the wildly eccentric Mr. Jensen. But the book’s central argument—that free-market theorists undermined the New Deal settlement and so unleashed chaos on the American economy—is not a good one. Most important, it doesn’t account for the extraordinary advantages afforded to the American economy in the 1950s and ’60s ... Mr. Lemann’s account similarly ignores the damage wrought by the federal government’s policy, running back to the New Deal, of treating financial institutions as too big to fail and thus encouraging them to behave foolishly. The book barely mentions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example. It’s a fine thing to see liberals and progressives revising their ideological precursors’ disdain for midcentury America. Maybe in a decade or two they’ll reconsider their hatred of the ’80s, too.

Lemann skillfully outlines the two dominant worldviews that governed the nation’s economic thought and life since the end of the Second World War ... Near the book’s conclusion, Lemann offers up some very thoughtful ideas about what can, and perhaps should, come next in the project to develop a big enough unifying set of ideas that can restore confidence in the future. But the heart of the book is not what comes next, but a dramatic and comprehensive presentation of what came before. And more than any specific predictions or recommendations for the future, what is so admirable and so useful about Transaction Man is that by delving so deeply into modern macroeconomic theory and examining what the previously dominant beliefs were about, the resulting understanding can help us think about what might—and what should—inform the next economic period.

Filled with fascinating details about the lives of small-town automobile dealers, hardworking inhabitants of a working-class neighborhood in Chicago, and derivatives traders, as well as consequential policies and policymakers, Transaction Man is an informative account of the forces that have transformed the economy and society of the United States ... Transaction Man is distinguished more by Mr. Lemann’s engaging and, at times, surprising stories about his well-chosen cast of characters than by the originality of his analysis ... Having laid out the failures of these 'grand conceptions,' Mr. Lemann proposes pluralism ... He might be right, but getting there won’t be easy.

[Lemann's] book is an unusual addition to a growing canon that seeks to explain why, for many ordinary people, the American Dream has come to seem out of reach. Rather than focusing on macroeconomic factors such as growth, productivity or unemployment, in Transaction Man Mr Lemann dwells on how companies are run. Its publication is timely, given the recent statement by the Business Roundtable, a group of bosses, that firms should be run for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. But for all its rich reporting and panache, it lacks rigor ... As an intricate feat of storytelling, the author...just about carries it off. There are dazzling passages ... Yet for all the sparkle, the book suffers from two flaws. One is a smouldering identity crisis: it can’t make up its mind whether it is a polemic about how America has gone to hell or a more standard history, anchored in empiricism ... The second flaw is that Transaction Man does not furnish a considered framework for how the economy works and creates prosperity ... hard questions are dodged ... Read this book for the vivid panorama, not for the logic of its argument.

Lemann acknowledges that economics is complex by skillfully analyzing macro- and microeconomic interrelationships and examining each theory’s strengths, weaknesses, and overall flaws. It becomes clearer how economics impacts different societal layers ... Through the stories of individuals, often from varied neighborhoods, businesses, and corporations, Lemann makes these experiences come alive. Readers can use this insightful business history to guide their forecasts.

...[an] excellent and unusually framed economic history ... [Lemann] thoughtfully links income inequality to the transactional theories of the corporation and looks ahead to a possible future model for 'pluralism' ... This concise and cogent history of the theories that have transformed the American economy makes a potentially dry subject fascinating.

Though the author’s high-level theorizing is confusing at times, he wisely offers general readers a solid foundation by discussing the impact of each era on citizens in specific neighborhoods ... 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.