Over his long career in journalism, he contributed to a number of national magazines in the United States, including The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.
[7][8] Lemann devotes much of chapter 1, to the life and work of Adolf A. Berle Jr. (1895 – 1971) who introduced a revised theory of the firm, as described in The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) —a detailed empirical study with "statistical evidence" provided by Gardiner Means.
[2][10] These two books "were essentially hostile to corporations" and focused on "shenanigans", according to Lemann, whereas Berle combined a "much broader historical and social perspective" along with detailed statistical evidence.
Public sentiment had shifted from the glorification of achievements accomplished by corporations in the 1920s which had led to a "delirious moneymaking opportunity for the growing American middle class" to questioning of the 1920s "economic arrangements" that "had utterly failed and needed to be replaced.
"[2] In 1932 Berle wrote "The Nature of the Difficulty", a memorandum, in which he said that "for the first time in its history the federal government had to assume responsibility for the economic condition of the country.
"[2] Berle called for "dramatic new measures" which included "pumping more money into the economy through tax cuts; offering government guarantees of job security and of savings deposited in banks; creating a new federal agency that would regulate the stock market; developing a new system of federal old-age pensions and health and unemployment insurance; and relaxing the antitrust laws and the traditional restrictions on the size of banks in exchange for imposing greater regulation on them.
[2] According to Lemann, it was Berle and his wife Beatrice who wrote the September 23, 1932 speech that President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco—the "blueprint for the enormous change in the American political order, which the public hadn't yet started calling the New Deal.
"[2] In 1952, John Kenneth Galbraith, one of Berle's protégés and " the leading champion of the liberal idea that the corporation, properly handled, could provide the economic foundation for a benign social order", published his book American Capitalism.
"[2] David Riesman's 1950 influential publication The Lonely Crowd said that corporations had transformed the United States from a country of "independent individuals into one of company men for whom the need for approval was an 'insatiable force.'
"[2] In his 1948 highly-influential textbook Economics which was written in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War, Paul Samuelson, popularized the work of John Maynard Keynes and was "highly skeptical of Berle-style planning" and Galbraith's theories.
[2] Lemann said that the Council of Economic Advisers—a "permanent office in the White House"—consisted mainly of academic economists focused on how "well markets functioned rather than how much power corporations".
"[3] In his review in the Wall Street Journal, Barton Swain disagreed with Lemann's "central argument—that free-market theorists undermined the New Deal settlement and so unleashed chaos on the American economy.
[17] According to Swain, Lemann over-stressed the influence of the American economist, Michael Jensen's 1976 paper, Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure, which he co-authored with William H.
[18]: 305–360 [19] 'Theory of the Firm was one of the most widely cited economics papers of the last 40 years, it implied the theory of the public corporation as an ownerless entity, made up of only contractual relationships, a field pioneered by Ronald Coase.