The Fifth Risk Quotes

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“My biggest concern is the misuse of science to support policies.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“In 2005 Rick Santorum, a senator from AccuWeather’s home state of Pennsylvania and a recipient of Myers family campaign contributions, introduced a bill that would have written this idea into law. The bill was a little vague, but it appeared to eliminate the National Weather Service’s website or any other means of communication with the public. It allowed the Weather Service to warn people about the weather just before it was about to kill them, but at no other time—and exactly how anyone would be any good at predicting extreme weather if he or she wasn’t predicting all the other weather was left unclear. Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked “Rural Development.” That’s not what has happened.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say,” Can you not mention that the government gave this?”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data. The USDA removed the inspection reports of businesses accused of animal abuse by the government. The new acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, said he wanted to end public access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions. Two weeks after Hurricane Maria, statistics that detailed access to drinking water and electricity in Puerto Rico were deleted from the FEMA website. In a piece for FiveThirtyEight, Clare Malone and Jeff Asher pointed out that the first annual crime report released by the FBI under Trump was missing nearly three-quarters of the data tables from the previous year.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“All good inventions come from something personal,” she said. “People create things because it’s personal.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make,” she said. “I know what things cost because I made them.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which, upon inspection, proved to be a Washington, DC, propaganda machine funded with millions of dollars from ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. Pyle himself had served as a Koch Industries lobbyist and ran a business on the side writing editorials attacking the DOE’s attempts to reduce the dependence of the American economy on carbon.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“Walking through the ruins, she saw all over again what she had seen so many times: how much better Americans were at responding to a disaster than preventing it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“The problems that had been Obama's problems for the past eight years were about to become Trump's problems. But his people didn't seem to want to know about them.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“lot of that money went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversation turned to handouts to big grain producers. “The money follows the political power of the constituencies,”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“The rapacity of companies with monopolistic power, and their ability to have their way with the government, got her thinking about the big American systems.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“The relationship between the people and their government troubled her. The government was the mission of an entire society: why was the society undermining it? “I’m routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government,” she said. “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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“Fracking—to take one example—was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE. Yet fracking has collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to American energy independence. Solar and wind technologies are another example. The”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“fourth risk: the electrical grid. The river and its tributaries generate more than 40 percent of the hydroelectric power for the United States; were the dams to fail, the effects would be catastrophic.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“BAFU. Billions and All Fucked Up.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“But if you worry about everything, you wind up worrying about nothing.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“In eight years alone—2010–2018—the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy