The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. 

4/5 rating. 254 pages.

Book #8 of 2024. Finished February 18, 2024.

This book is an ode to the work that is actually done by the US government and its workers.

The title is in response to a question Michael asks multiple top-government officials: what are the five most dangerous risks right now? One of them lists:

1) Lost or damaged nuclear bombs

2) North Korean nukes

3) Iranian nukes

4) The electric grid’s vulnerability

5) Bad project management (or as Michael says: “the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.”

On this 5th risk, he discusses how ill-prepared and uninterested Trump was in making the government work well as president. While both Republican and Democratic presidential appointees generally send huge teams out to as many different parts of the government as possible, Trump sent few people, and when he did, they were there mostly for show.

Michael does an amazing job showing the incredible work that the government does for all citizens. There are obviously a myriad of ways that it comes up short, is inefficient, and does things wrongly or poorly. But this being said, the way to fix that is to address the inefficiencies, not gut the thing!

Instead of trying to improve its running, Trump is shown to have done an awful job setting up a workable government. There were instances of obvious nepotism like the chief scientist of the USDA – which has responsibilities such as keeping bird flu from spreading, different plant-breeding strategies to keep them from dying out from disease, and ensuring the meat you receive has the least chance of killing you or making you sick. Instead of hiring anyone with a lick of scientific background, Trump hired an administrator who just happened to have been the co-chairman for Trump’s campaign. Showing that loyalty to Trump is more important than the health and safety of all Americans!!

Barry Myers comes up again and again, also. This is the person that Trump decided as best equipped to oversee the branch of the government that has NOAA, the entity in charge of collecting weather data. Every single bit of weather data you see comes from public satellites and other tools funded by YOUR taxes. But Barry is the CEO of AccuWeather, a private weather company which has CONTINUALLY worked to make the information that your money funds only available through apps like his that charge money. If you really want to see what he thinks is the top priority, only look to the fact that AccuWeather managed to forecast a tornado before it hit….instead of sharing this with people whose lives could be saved by it, his company kept it to themselves and only shared the fact that a natural disaster that kills many people every year was barreling towards them with their paying customers. That’s bullshit and actions like that should be illegal.

This book just solidified for me the fact that most civil servants do amazing and important work and we need to make sure that can continue and even get better. It also made me infuriated that someone who had such a disdain for the government and its proper running is legitimately going to get another shot at being in control of it.

Quotes:

– “To which Trump replied, Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money.“

– “The Obama administration set a goal in 2009 of getting the cost of utility-scale solar energy down by 2020 from 27 cents a kilowatt-hour to 6 cents. It’s now at 7 cents, and competitive with natural gas because of loans made by the DOE. ‘The private sector only steps in once DOE shows it can work,’ said Franklin Orr, a Stanford professor of engineering who took a two-year leave of absence to oversee the DOE’s science programs.”

– “There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.”

– “ARPA-E had since won the praise of business leaders from Bill Gates to Lee Scott, the former CEO of Walmart, to Fred Smith, the Republican founder of FedEx, who has said that ‘pound for pound, dollar for dollar, activity for activity, it’s hard to find a more effective thing government has done than ARPA-E.’ Trump’s first budget eliminated ARPA-E altogether. It also eliminated the spectacularly successful $70 billion loan program. It cut funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of six thousand of their people. It eliminated all research on climate change. It halved the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster. ‘All the risks are science-based’ said John MacWilliams when he saw the budget. ‘You can’t gut science. If you do, you’re hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country.’”

– “We don’t just have markets. We have values.”

– “Exposed to the early-autumn chill, we play New England’s favorite outdoor social game: seeing who will be the first to break and beg to go back inside.”

– “Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend.”

– “The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversation turned to handouts to big grain producers.”

– “‘In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say, “Can you not mention that the government gave this?”‘ Even when it was saving lives, or preserving communities, the government remained oddly invisible. ‘It’s just a misunderstanding of the system,’ said Salerno. ‘We don’t teach people what government actually does.’”

– “Salerno concluded [after being illegally undercut by a monopoly competitor] that increased corporate power was one of the forces that had reduced the opportunity available in rural America. The rapacity of companies with monopolistic power, and their ability to have their way with the government, got her thinking about the big American systems. ‘The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make,’ she said. ‘I know what things cost because I made them.’”

– “The Trump administration wanted to show early that it was serious about foreign trade. This desire expressed itself in the Department of Agriculture by a splitting of the little box marked ‘Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services’ into two little boxes – one for farm programs and another for Foreign Agricultural Affairs, or trade. Oddly, at that very moment, Trump was removing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and costing American farmers an estimated $4.4 billion a year in foreign sales, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. As there’s a rule against having more than seven little boxes on the USDA’s org chart, they had to eliminate one of the little boxes. The little box they got rid of was Rural Development. ‘I worked in the little box in the government most responsible for helping the people who elected Trump,’ said Salerno. ‘And they literally took my little box off the organization chart.’”

– “Zaidi marveled at how hard it was for Americans to see the source of their society’s strength. People who came to the United States from other countries had this one advantage: they didn’t take it for granted. ‘The immigrant journey has a time compression to it,’ he said. ‘Within a generation you’re able to see how the rungs of the ladder of opportunity are laid out in front of you, and you can see the hands that pull you up. You see people pull you up and you say ‘Okay, I’ve got to do the same thing for other people.’ I came up that ladder of opportunity, but even I didn’t know the names of the government programs thst made up the ladder itself. Growing up, what was obvious to me was the kindness of community members. But government was less visible. You need to work really hard to appreciate it.’”

– “After the Joplin tornado, the Weather Service set out to build an app, to better disseminate warnings to the public. AccuWeather already had a weather app, Myers barked, and the government should not compete with it. (‘Barry Myers [the guy that Trump made the head of the branch of the government including the National Weather Service!] is the reason we don’t have the app,’ says a senior National Weather Service official.) In 2015, the Weather Company offered to help NOAA put it’s satellite data in the cloud, on servers owned by Google and Amazon. Virtually all the satellite data that came into NOAA wound up in places where no one could ever see it again. The Weather Company simply sought to render it accessible to the public. Myers threatened to sue the Weather Service if they did it. ‘He stopped it,’ said David Kenny. ‘We were willing to donate the technology to NOAA for free. We just wanted to do a science project to prove that we could.’”

– “A white child born into the upper-income quintile was five times more likely to stay there than to fall to the bottom. A black child born into the upper-income quintile was as likely to fall to the bottom as to remain rich.”

– “‘The problem with our science is that it is new,’ she said. ‘And we don’t know how to make people not die. We need data on what led a person to do what they did. We need observations of humans responding to weather information.’ She’d made some progress. She’d also been frustrated. ‘Barry Myers [AccuWeather’s CEO] turned up at a meeting and said that I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing,’ she said. ‘Because it’s marketing. But it’s not marketing. It’s saving lives. The question became: What can we do in the space without interfering with the profits of AccuWeather?’”

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