Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service Quotes

“Why am I spending another minute of my life reading about and yapping about Donald Trump when I know nothing about the 2 million or so federal employees and their possibly lifesaving work that the president is intent on eliminating?”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“That’s because you cannot trust Americans to take only their slice of the American Dream. Many Americans want the whole dream, and then they want to sell it back to the rest of us at an extremely marked-up price.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“The "false narrative" and "obtuse political talking points" around the IRS's criminal investigations depress him. He wishes more people knew about the work Koopman and his agents really do -- these tireless, dedicated people, working all hours, shutting down suppliers of fentanyl, saving kids, disrupting terrorists...Oh, and as a byproduct of that work, making cryptocurrency a safer space for all those libertarians who hate the IRS, so that they can go get rich without being ripped off.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

“joining the civil service is basically like being in the Witness Protection Program: “No one ever knows about the good you do.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“The new enemy of the Enlightenment doesn’t believe in any kind of verities beyond personal feeling and experience. It has no use for statistics or numbers or data. It doesn’t hold any truths to be self-evident.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“We are stewards of resources that belong to the American people”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

“Since some of his relatives were vacationing in nearby Michigan, he (Danny Werfel) decided to drive up for a reunion. And (he's) thinking, All these roads are in great condition! The quality of life we have, it's all government. Government touches you a hundred times before breadfast, and you don't even know it.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

“The misery index is the unemployment rate plus inflation. At the time Okun devised it, the index stood at 8.12. In the intervening years, it has fluctuated between a high of 21.98 under Jimmy Carter in June 1980 and a low of 5.06 under Barack Obama in September 2015.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“His agency is one of the world’s leading experts on death, but he is an expert on how to live.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“Writers write the words, but readers decide their meaning.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“Who among us doesn’t want to be better at everything? Not just our work, however momentous or mundane it might be, but every aspect of our life: relationships, friendships, health, hobbies, community, stewardship of the earth, everything. Most of us, thankfully, aren’t terrible at what we do. We’re okay or pretty good. But Walters reminds us: Why not be better? Why not be the best? It isn’t impossible; it simply demands our constant devotion. Perpetual care, it turns out, is not just for cemeteries.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“As the BLS itself says, “The CPI does not necessarily measure your own experience with price change.” It captures a broader general truth. To produce it, you have to accept that what you’re doing is in some sense impossible; but at the same time, you accept that it has to be done, and it has to be done as well as it possibly can be. You have to try to achieve objectivity while knowing that it can’t be attained. Maybe this double-mindedness is something we have lost or are on the verge of losing.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“particular point in U.S. history. “It’s not hard to be nonpartisan. It’s hard to be perceived as nonpartisan. Our work is trying to make the federal government be better. Everyone in this country and beyond has an interest in seeing that happen. And what we stand for is good service to the American people. That is nonpartisan. It’s not bipartisan. But the issues that we address are being pulled into the partisan sphere in ways that are not helpful to the success of our country.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“Get rid of that idea, and we would be abandoning the Enlightenment and the ambitions for progress that came with it. We would enter a new philosophical anti-system. Call it the Darkening. Let’s not give in to it without a fight.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes,”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“Since some of his relatives were vacationing in nearby Michigan, he (Danny Werfel) decided to drive up for a reunion. And (he's) thinking, All these roads are in great condition! The quality of life we have, it's all government. Government touches you a hundred times before breakfast, and you don't even know it.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

“In management-speak, Walters loves the Baldrige criteria, named for President Ronald Reagan’s commerce secretary Malcolm Baldrige Jr., which focus on seven categories of performance: leadership; strategy; customers; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce; operations; and results. In total quality terms, Walters is big on the “PDCA cycle,” implementing Plan-Do-Check-Act at every scale of his operation, from the height of the grass to the annual budget.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“One fact stands out: When the misery index has been in double figures, during an election year, the incumbent president has lost. This was the case for Carter in 1980; for George H.W. Bush in 1992, when it hit 10.89; and for Donald Trump in 2020, when the pandemic’s impact took the index from 5.21 in September 2019 to 15.03 seven months later. The only president to have survived a double-digit misery index in an election year was Reagan in 1984, but he seems to have been protected by the fact that the number was declining all through the campaign, from 19.93 at his inauguration in 1981 to 11.25 by the time of his reelection in 1984.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. The”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“Voyager 1 in 2012 became the first human creation to leave our solar system entirely. It’s currently 15 billion miles from Earth—and is still sending back data.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“His early cases were white-collar crimes such as investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. “I’m 20 years old, sitting across the table from people in their 80s who are crying because they’ve trusted someone with their hard-earned retirement savings, and they’ve lost everything. You want to get the person responsible for that.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“But as Mark Twain said: “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“This work has, among other things, led to the rescue of 23 children from rape and assault, the seizure of a quarter-million child abuse videos, and the arrest of 370 alleged pedophiles. It has resulted in the largest-ever seizure of cryptocurrency headed to Hamas, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. When Changpeng Zhao, chief of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, reported to prison in June, it was because Koopman’s small cybercrime team had uncovered evidence of the firm’s money laundering for terrorists and sanctions-busting for Iran, Syria and Russia. In the past 10 years, this work has returned more than $12 billion to victims of crime and to the U.S. Treasury. If he worked anywhere else, Koopman would probably be celebrated. But he’s employed by the Internal Revenue Service, the arm of government that even its commissioner, Danny Werfel, describes as “iconically unpopular.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it. People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“Industry executives who visited Penn State made it clear to Chris that they viewed safety as a subject for wimps and losers.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service