The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

by Michael Lewis

The fifth risk did not put him at risk of revealing classified information. “Project management,” was all he said.

It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

Here is where the Trump administration’s willful ignorance plays a role. 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 really 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.

When they heard that Joel Leftwich, the guy Trump wanted to lead his USDA transition team, had been a lobbyist for PepsiCo, they brought in a mini-fridge stocked with Pepsis. That was just the way they were at the USDA. They didn’t think: How the fuck can people paid to push sugary drinks on American kids be let anywhere near the federal department with the most influence on what American

kids eat? Instead they thought: I hear he’s a nice guy!

In 2011 Friedberg decided to sell exclusively to farmers, and WeatherBill changed its name to The Climate Corporation. “We needed to feel a little less Silicon Valley and less whimsical,” said Friedberg. For the next few years he would spend half his time on the road, explaining himself to people whose first step was toward mistrust. “Farmers don’t believe anything,” he said. “There’s always been some bullshit product for farmers. And the people selling it are usually from out of town.”

People in the places he’d traveled lived from paycheck to paycheck. They were exposed to risks in ways that he was not: the weather was just one of those risks. He began to notice other kinds of data—for instance, that 40 percent of Americans can’t cover an unexpected expense of a thousand bucks. The farmers usually weren’t so bad off, but their situation was inherently precarious and threatened by modernity. Farmers didn’t work on desktop computers, and so they’d largely skipped the initial internet revolution. But they had mobile phones, and in 2008, when the 3G networks went up in rural America, farmers finally got online. “The problem with the internet is that it shows everyone on earth what they’re missing,” said Friedberg. “And if you can’t get to it, you feel you are getting fucked. That there is this very visceral and obvious shift that is happening in the world that you’re missing out on.” At the same time David Friedberg was helping farmers to secure their immediate economic future, he was threatening their identity. Your family has been tilling this same soil for a century, and yet this data-crunching machine I’ve built in just a few years can do it better. The phrase was a whisper underlying every conversation he’d had with a farmer. Friedberg played in a high-stakes poker game with some friends in the tech world. In their last game before the 2016 presidential election, he offered to bet anyone who would take the other side that Donald Trump would win.

The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.

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.