Date Published: October 2, 2018
Format: Print
Source: Library
Date Read: May 9-10, 2019
Blurb
What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?
Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.
Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and 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.
If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system—those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.
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Review
Another great reading time spent with Michael Lewis. This is a compilation of his work for Vanity Fair at the beginning of the Trump administration. But it goes beyond the incompetency and willful ignorance of the Trump administration - the American people really don't know how governmental agencies work (example #1 - Rick Perry and the DoE). So Lewis did a deep dive into just how the work of three Departments (Energy, Agriculture, and NOAA/NOW) affect the day-to-day life of Americans. The fifth risk comes from "program management" - or lack thereof. Turns out, program management is a huge deal and can have consequences that last a generation or more; unfortunately it is not as scary as disease outbreak or sexy as DoD launching rockets at random countries. This should be required reading for any high school or college civics class. Highly recommend.
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