# books / The Fifth Risk -- Michael Lewis

cover

A book which talks a little about Trump’s administration & the lack of interest it had in actually administrating.

Much more interesting is the incredible number of things the US Government does (meaning the civil servants saving lives & solving incredible problems) and how due to short-term & corporate interests, it goes unrecognised. In fact, the government is bilaterally criticised.

Fascinating.

Highlights

…why this critical job hadn’t been handed to someone who actually knew something about government. “We don’t have anyone,” said Lewandowski.

…pressed him to attend his daughter, Ivanka, and Jared Kushner’s wedding. That’d be awkward! said Christie. I’m paying for the wedding and I don’t give a shit, said Donald.

To which Trump replied, Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition. Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.

“What do you think Morning Joe will say—if you shut down your transition?”

The money people donated to his campaign Trump considered, effectively, his own. He thought the planning and forethought pointless.

“Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”

“The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say, ‘This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I’ve ever worked with.’ This happens over and over and over.”

Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. “You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said, “now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t so much as say hello to Trump.

Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like … I love the Bangles! You know that song ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.

He’d asked Jared Kushner what that was about, and Jared had simply said, Donald ran a very unconventional campaign, and he’s not going to follow any of the protocols.

Flynn’s name wasn’t on the list. But here he was, in the meeting to decide who would do what in the Trump administration, and Ivanka was asking him which job he’d like to have.

Across the federal government the Trump people weren’t anywhere to be found. The few places they did turn up, they appeared confused and unprepared.

Barack Obama had instructed a lot of knowledgeable people across his administration, including fifty or so inside the DOE, to gather the knowledge that his successor would need in order to understand the government he or she was taking charge of.

They demanded to know the names and salaries of the twenty highest-paid people in the national science labs overseen by the DOE. They’d eventually delete the contact list with the email addresses of all DOE-funded scientists—apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another. “These people were insane,”

“They were just looking for dirt, basically,”

“The actual government has not really taken over,” said Max Stier. “It’s kindergarten soccer. Everyone is on the ball. No one is at their positions. But I doubt Trump sees the reality.

Perry confessed that when he called for its elimination he hadn’t actually known what the Department of Energy did—and he now regretted having said that it didn’t do anything worth doing.

when I asked someone familiar with those briefings how many hours Perry had spent with Moniz, he laughed and said, “That’s the wrong unit of account.”

…the program has turned a profit. And it has been demonstrably effective: it lent money to Tesla to build its factory in Fremont, California, when the private sector would not, for instance. Every Tesla you see on the road came from a facility financed by the DOE.

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.

less Panglossian view of its inner workings. “Government has always played a major role in innovation,” he said. “All the way back to the founding of the country. Early-stage innovation in most industries would not have been possible without government support in a variety of ways, and it’s especially true in energy. So the notion that we are just going to privatize early-stage innovation is ridiculous.

The whole point was to take big risks the market would not take, and they were making money!

The fifth risk did not put him at risk of revealing classified information. “Project management,” was all he said.
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. “Program management” is not just program management. “Program management” is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk.

Short-term-ism, again.

Hanford researchers in the late 1960s went to a local prison and paid the inmates to allow the irradiation of their testicles, to see just how much radiation a man can receive before the tails fall from his sperm.

Woah

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.
Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science.

Defunding science is defunding opposition

‘If you are a store owner after Katrina, should you hike up the price of flashlights?’ Greg Mankiw said yes, without hesitation.” Ali remembers thinking: Greg Mankiw is a good guy. But that answer is absolutely wrong. We don’t just have markets. We have values.

the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés.

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.

The company that had made the old syringes, Becton, Dickinson & Co., controlled more than 80 percent of the market and felt threatened. It wasn’t long before Becton started to require hospital systems to buy its clumsy new version of a safe syringe, by bundling it with other products.

Fifteen percent of the country lives in towns of fewer than 10,000 people, for instance, but a far greater proportion of the armed services come from rural areas than from urban ones.
the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked “Rural Development.” That’s not what has happened.

One day someone will write the history of the strange relationship between the United States government and its citizens. It would need at least a chapter on the government’s attempts to save the citizens from the things that might kill them.

…how much better Americans were at responding to a disaster than preventing it. Everybody who could was pitching in to help.

“I always thought, Isn’t this room supposed to look different when it has no air in it? But there’s no difference!”

“The image of a good network is messy,” said DJ. “It’s really hard to fake messiness. It’s hard to fake being an American with a credit card.”

What could they call all these data people? “Data scientist,” his Facebook friend suggested. “We weren’t trying to create a new field or anything, just trying to get HR off our backs,” said DJ. He replaced the job titles for some openings with “data scientist.” To his surprise, the number of applicants for the jobs skyrocketed. “Data scientists” were what people wanted to be.

But the National Weather Service was forbidden by law from advertising the value of its services

just over 90 percent of children born in 1940 went on to earn more than their parents, only 50 percent of children born in the 1980s did so.
big reason was not lower rates of economic growth but the increasingly unequal distribution of money. More and more of the gains were being captured by the very rich.

Mobility had a racial dimension as well: 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.

Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation—a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which a child was involved—were more likely to use excessive force. Maybe the problem wasn’t as simple as a bad cop. Maybe it was the emotional state in which the cop had found himself.

He discovered that a black person in a car was no more likely to be pulled over by the police than a white person. The difference was what happened next. “If you’re black you’re way more likely to get searched”

A few cops in one southern city were ten times more likely than others to search a black person they had pulled over.

There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.

The relationship between the people and their government troubled her. The government was the mission of an entire society: why was the society undermining it?

“The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense.”

And so you might have good reason to pray for a tornado, whether it comes in the shape of swirling winds, or a politician. You imagine the thing doing the damage that you would like to see done, and no more. It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you.

…changing the question he was asking. “When I got to the Coast Guard, their question was: How well do you see, and how do we make you see better?” he said. “My question was: Where do you look? It doesn’t matter how well you see—if you are looking in the wrong place, you aren’t going to find it.”