The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

by Michael Lewis

Once again, the U.S. government had it. NOAA had forty years’ worth of infrared satellite images of all the land in the United States—again on tape drives in some basement. Plants absorb visible light and emit infrared light: you could calculate the biomass in a field by how much infrared light it emitted. Friedberg brokered a deal with Google, which had digitized the information and gave him access to it for free. “That’s when we discovered that farmers were lying about the dates they were planting,” said Friedberg. The federal crop insurance program, seeking to minimize the risk of freeze, stipulated the earliest date that a farmer was allowed to plant. But the earlier the seeds went into the ground, the richer the crop. To qualify for the insurance, farmers had been claiming to have planted their seeds later than they had. The lie had been captured for decades by satellite, but no one had been able to see the data.