The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

by Michael Lewis

“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.”

Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company. “

Then he realized: the man Trump nominated to run NOAA thought that people who wanted a weather forecast should have to pay him for it. 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“The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer.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.”

The problem was that no one in government liked to pay now if they could pay later.

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

“A government agency does not have an incentive to hype. Private companies have an incentive to hype. The problem when you hype is that you reduce confidence in all weather forecasts, because no one knows the source of the information.”

Inside the federal agencies whose funding was withheld, about half of the employees were required to work without pay, as their jobs involved “the safety of human life or the protection of property.” But the others, about four hundred thousand federal employees, were deemed inessential, and actually required by law not to work.

“People in government don’t think to talk about themselves.”

It’s curious how knowledge is at once so hard to create and so easily taken for granted.