"The Need for a Compassionate Social Contract"

"Together, Lemann and Appelbaum contribute to the second wave of post-2008 commentary. The first postmortems focused narrowly on the global financial crisis, dissecting the distorted incentives, regulatory frailty, and groupthink that caused bankers to blow up the world economy. The new round of analysis broadens the lens, searching out larger political and intellectual wrong turns, an expansion that reflects the morphing of the 2008 crash into a general populist surge. By excavating history, Lemann and Appelbaum remind us that Transaction Man and his economist allies were not always ascendant, and that they won't necessarily remain so. This frees both writers to ask whether an alternative social contract might be imaginable, or preferable."

Sebastian Mallaby in The Atlantic reviews Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream and Binyamin Appelbaum's The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society.