The Fifth Risk
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Average rating4.1
Michael Lewis's brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it's not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.
Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.
If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes—unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system: those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.
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TL;DR: of the whole book...
There are hundreds of thousands of government employees who do very important jobs—preventing nuclear disasters, weather disasters, and health disasters. Many of these employees are bi-partisan field experts with decades of experience.
At transition time when Trump took power these experts summarized all of the critical information to onboard Trump's incoming team.
The incoming team didn't arrive for weeks, months, and when they did arrive they: ignored the experts and onboarding material, were completely incompetent pushing simplistic, destructive political agendas, and shutting down important programs. All for private financial gain, harming Americans.
The fifth risk is a long tail of black swan events that could destroy America due to the ignorance of senior leadership in not investing in preventative measures.
The book dives in to lots of examples of these risks in detail. Feels well researched. But is kind of scattered with no call to action (other than, I guess, don't vote for Trump). 80% of the book is spent describing country/state-wide failure scenarios in detail and the widespread waste of opportunities we're missing by disabling government employees from doing great work.
This book sets out to show why the 45 admin was wrong - not learning from the outgoers nor propelling science forward. It succeeds, I guess.
The real interesting part, and what drew me to it, was looking at top risks as seen from different lenses.
It's curious to me that the top risks for the three departments covered are all essentially ‘not doing basic science'. Of course, the fifth risk...as laid out in part one is project management. — at least that's what's identified. It's not actually project management that is described though. The real identified risk is abandoning the long term gain for the short term gain. This is a risk we all understand intuitively but still fall into. It's partying instead of studying. It's buying the shoes today instead of the computer tomorrow. It's skipping a workout to watch TV. We watch this play out constantly in our private lives and in the government at all levels. ‘Surely the kids will love me more if I give them money now than if I save for their future.'
Eye-opening as to the diligence and dedication of federal agencies and the career employees who make it all happen. Countered by the ignorance of the Trump administration to recognize these assets AND to name political appointees to key positions in these agencies who are openly anti what the agency stands for and whose goal is to diminish them.
