The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

by Michael Lewis

This is not a trivial exercise, and to do it we rely entirely on scientists who go to work at the national labs because the national labs are exciting places to work. They then wind up getting interested in the weapons program. That is, because maintaining the nuclear arsenal was just a by-product of the world’s biggest science project, which also did things like investigating the origins of the universe. “Our weapons scientists didn’t start out as weapons scientists,” says Madelyn Creedon, who was second-in-command of the nuclear-weapons wing of the DOE, and who briefed the incoming administration, briefly. “They didn’t understand that. The one question they asked was,” Wouldn’t you want the guy who grew up wanting to be a weapons scientist?’ Well, actually, no. You wouldn’t.”

There might be no time in the history of the country when it was so interesting to know what was going on inside these bland federal office buildings—because there has been no time when those things might be done ineptly, or not done at all. But if you want to know how the DOE works—the problems it manages, the fears that keep its employees awake at night, the things it does you just sort of assume will continue being done—there’s no real point in being inside the DOE. Anyone who wants a blunt, open assessment of the risks inherent in the United States government now has to leave it to find it.

Existing energy businesses—oil companies, utilities—are obviously hostile to government-sponsored competition. At the same time, they are essentially commodity businesses, without a lot of fat in them. The stock market does not reward even big oil companies for research and development that will take decades to pay off. And the sort of research that might lead to huge changes in energy production often doesn’t pay off for decades. Plus it requires a lot of expensive science: discovering a new kind of battery or a new way of capturing solar energy is not like creating a new app.

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

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.

Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant. Donald Trump didn’t invent this desire. He was just its ultimate expression.

Protect the Harvest was founded by a Trump supporter, an Indiana oilman and rancher named Forrest Lucas. Its stated purpose was “to protect your right to hunt, fish, farm, eat meat, and own animals.” In practice it mainly demonized organizations, like the Humane Society, that sought to prevent people who owned animals from doing terrible things to them. They worried, apparently, that if people were forced to be kind to animals they might one day cease to eat them. “This is a weird group,” says Rachael Bale, who writes often about animal welfare for National Geographic.

As the USDA’s loans were usually made through local banks, the people on the receiving end of them were often unaware of where the money was coming from. There were many stories very like the one Tom Vilsack told, about a loan they had made, in Minnesota, to a government-shade-throwing, Fox News–watching, small-town businessman. The bank held a ceremony and the guy wound up being interviewed by the local paper. “He’s telling the reporter how proud he is to have done it on his own,” said Vilsack. “The USDA person goes to introduce herself, and he says,‘So, who are you?’ She says,” I’m the USDA person.’ He

The dystopic endgame is not difficult to predict: the day you get only the weather forecast you pay for. A private company will become better than the Weather Service at knowing where a hurricane will make landfall: What will it do with that information? Tell the public or trade it inside a hedge fund? You know what Hurricane Harvey is going to do to Houston before Houston knows: Do you help Houston? Or do you find clever ways to make money off Houston’s destruction?

Journalists at ProPublica had combed through it and discovered odd concentrations of opioid prescriptions. “We would never have figured out that there was an opioid crisis without the data,” said DJ.

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. “Dispatch sent them right back out without time to decompress,” said DJ. “Give them a break in between and maybe they behave differently.”

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.”

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.”

meteorologists inside the Weather Service were bothered that people didn’t respond as expected to their warnings. But then they were weather geeks. Scientists. “I can’t trace exactly where or when or how the realization dawned [on us] that the jargon-laden bulletins were not comprehensible to users,” said Kathy. “Or that people didn’t respond to raw data; they respond to other human beings, trusted voices. Or that the punch line—what this storm may do to you—was often buried after many paragraphs of geeky weather details. Or that normal humans don’t understand probabilities and cannot translate a wind speed or rain rate into tangible worries about the roof coming off or being knee-deep in water. You don’t particularly care what the wind speed at five hundred millibars is. You want to know: What’s it going to do to my house?”

The conversation really matters. Converse means exchange with. It does not mean transmit at. That’s how you get new thinking.’” She’d heard a line once that still resonated with her: The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.