A New Yorker writer explores the seismic changes the United States has undergone in the last generation—particularly when it comes to rising income inequality—examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras as well as the one we live in now.
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.
