The Fifth Risk Free Pdf

ISBN: 1324002646
Title: The Fifth Risk Pdf
Author: Michael Lewis
Published Date: 2018-10-02
Page: 256

“[A] page turner.… [Lewis'] most ambitious and important book.” - New York Times Book Review“Fascinating―and at times harrowing…. Lewis tells an important and timely story, one that all of us who pay for, care about, and want government to work should hear.” - NPR“A hymn to the 'deep state,' which is revealed as nothing more than people who know what they're talking about.” - Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing“[A] spellbinding, alarming analysis of the most serious threats to Americans’ safety happening now from inside the U.S. government.” - Quartz“Displaying his usual meticulous research and fluid prose, [Lewis] makes the federal bureaucracy come alive by focusing on a few individuals within each agency with fascinating―and sometimes heartwarming―backstories.…[A] well-written primer on how the government serves citizens in underappreciated ways.” - Kirkus (starred review)“Illuminating.… It's relevance to readers won't end with the Trump era.” - Publishers Weekly Praise for Michael Lewis"Saturation reporting, conceptual thinking of a high order, a rich sense of humor, and talent to burn."―Tom Wolfe"Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects."―John Gapper, Financial Times"[Lewis] has a genius for unearthing tales of the counterintuitive."―Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review"The leading journalist of his generation."―Kyle Smith, Forbes"Lewis is the kind of writer who creates his own weather system."―John Lanchester, London Review of Books"I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it."―John Williams, New York Times Book Review"[A] master of the character-driven narrative."―Charlie Gofen, National Book Review

New York Times Bestseller

What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?

"The election happened," remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. "And then there was radio silence." Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them.

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 gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and 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.

one of the great living writers This is the 11th book I've read by Michael Lewis. As with the other books, his trademark style is every-present:1) He has great access to the major players and also gets down in the dirt with the people on the front lines. They provide him with a deep background and often some wonderful quotes.2) Mr. Lewis is very good at constructing sentences and paragraphs. This may seem elementary, but as a former high school English teacher and current college professor, I can assure you that books written by professionals and released by major publishing houses are sometimes poorly thought out and often difficult to slog through. Mr. Lewis is able to inform and entertain. Basically, he is a master storyteller.The Fifth Risk is what happens when we make long term decisions for short term reasons. Mr. Lewis begins the book with the Department of Energy and how President-Elect Trump did not have a plan to take over from the Obama appointees. This flew in the face of precedent. He goes on to examine the electric grid, school lunches, and notably, the national weather service. And other areas.People that love President Trump unconditionally will hate this, but then again, they probably aren't the kind of person that would read a Michael Lewis book in the first place. If you have liked (or loved) previous Lewis books, you'll be very pleased.Michael Lewis digs behind the headlines about the Trump Administration What does government do for us? Do we really need it? What happens if government ceases to do those things? These are the questions Michael Lewis comes to grip with in his powerful little book, The Fifth Risk. By drilling down into the day-to-day realities in a handful of little-recognized federal agencies, Lewis convincingly demonstrates how government protects us from some of "the most alarming risks facing humanity." By extension, he relates the dangers we (and the world as a whole) now face as the direct result of inattention, greed, and misguided policy by the Trump Administration.How government protects usAt the outset, Lewis makes the case that "The basic role of government is to keep us safe," to quote one of the expert government-watchers he interviewed. He points out that "The United States government employ[s] two million people, 70 percent of them one way or another in national security." As Lewis makes clear at length, that 70 percent doesn't include just those working in the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security. They also toil away in such little-recognized departments as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.Clearly, if a hurricane or a tsunami is on the way to your town, you sure want to know about it—and that's one of the principal functions of the National Weather Service, one of NOAA's agencies. NOAA supplies ALL the data on which our weather forecasts are based. That includes private entities and individuals such as Accuweather and The Weather Channel. Unsurprisingly, the Trump Administration is trying to cut NOAA's budget. Just imagine how American business, let alone the American public, would conduct our daily activities if we couldn't depend on accurate weather forecasts.The Department of Commerce has little to do with commerceFor some obscure reason, NOAA is located in the Department of Commerce. In fact, it turns out that the Department of Commerce has little to do with commerce and trade. As a practical matter, the department is a depository for much of the government's vast stores of data—not just on the weather but on the census, the economy, patents and trademarks, and many other matters. "The Department of Commerce should really be called the Department of Information," Lewis writes. This came as a shock to Trump's new Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, once he learned what the Department actually does. As Lewis makes clear, many of Trump's other top appointees were in for similar shocks. They came to their jobs completely unprepared, unwilling to learn from the extensive efforts by their predecessors to brief them, and often determined to undermine the work of the new departments in their charge. You're right to be worried about the consequences.A "bungled transition" is the root cause of much of the troubleIt's common knowledge that Donald Trump came to the Oval Office totally unprepared for the job and unwilling to learn what it might entail. In truth, he hadn't expected to win the election (and may well not have wanted to do so). "His campaign hadn't even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech," Lewis reports. But the problems the country (and the world) are now facing as a result run far deeper than Trump's own lack of preparation. Michael Lewis finds the bigger cause in a "bungled" Presidential Transition.Trump insisted he didn't want to form a Transition Team. Somehow, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie managed to convince him, anyway. Christie assembled a small team beginning months before Election Day. Shortly afterward, he delivered to the President-elect a list of (presumably) qualified people to fill many of the 4,000 top government jobs. Nothing happened. Then, a month later, Christie and his entire team were fired, and the team's report disappeared. A new Transition Team dominated by Steve Bannon and Trump personally began work from scratch in December, barely a month before the new Administration would assume power. Is it any wonder that the result was chaotic? Should we be surprised that so many of the most senior positions were filled with people who were ill-suited for the jobs they were given?Interview with a Chief Risk OfficerOne of the many former high-level government officials Lewis interviewed was John MacWilliams, who had served as the Chief Risk Officer of the Department of Energy (DOE) late in the Obama years. Like Commerce, DOE is a conglomerate department that encompasses a host of functions no unsuspecting member of the public might guess. "About half its budget in 2016 went to maintaining the nuclear arsenal and protecting Americans from nuclear threats," Lewis notes. MacWilliams pointed out to him that, in fact, DOE is "'the place where you could work on the two biggest risks to human existence, nuclear weapons and climate change.'" Lewis asked MacWilliams to identify the "top five risks I need to worry about right away."So, what is the "Fifth Risk?"Accidents with nuclear weapons and climate change top the list of five. They're the first risk. The second and third are a potential attack by North Korea and the threat that Iran might develop a nuclear weapon now that Trump has pulled out of the Iran treaty. MacWilliams identifies the fourth as the fragility of our electrical grid. What, then, is the Fifth Risk? "'Project management,'" MacWilliams says. To illustrate, he pointed Lewis to the decommissioned plutonium production facility at Hanford, Washington, which the author toured. There, a local official explained that "'There are Fukushima-level events that could happen at any time.'" Without competent and attentive management, anything could happen there. We take for granted that our government protects us from such threats. But are we safe to do so under this Administration? Who might be appointed to manage the 200 square miles of nuclear risks at Hanford?"There is an upside to ignorance"Lewis notes that "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." This is exactly what the Trump Administration hopes to do with Hanford, by cutting its budget—and with so many other government programs. "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." And isn't this just exactly what's going on throughout the federal government under Donald Trump?

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