The Number 1 Risk
Michael Lewis, The Fith Risk
It is not the most damning analysis of Trumpism because… where do you even start? But if you had to start somewhere maybe it is the willful ignorance (at best) of the institution our country has built over the course of three hundred years. We have built a government that is far from perfect but does a lot of great things that help hundreds of millions of people, literally. When deciding to cover this topic — you can start with the weather data that can predict deadly tornadoes, or halting a food-illness outbreak, or a program that feeds millions of poor people who would be begging on the street without it, or you can feature some of the brilliant people who have dedicated their lives to these tasks — or you can do both, and make it one of your most important books, even if you wrote others that changed industries.
There are a lot of head-banging moments but maybe there is one that encapsulates all the others. Mr. Wilbur Ross — an actual Mr. Burns — was appointed Secretary of Commerce because he gave a lot of money to the Trump campaign and loves money, and since the word commerce has to do with money, he should be the Secretary of Commerce, right? No, of course not, and even better, Secretary of Commerce “is seriously misnamed.” Lewis writes. “It has almost nothing to do with commerce directly, and it is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business.” What it actually does is collect all of the country’s economic statistics, tracks all of its inventions, set standards for construction building, but what it mostly does is to “figure out the weather.’ Of the $9billion spent by the Commerce Department, $5 billion goes to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This has absolutely nothing to do with Ross’ experience of high finance and corporate raiding.
A former W. Bush official told Ross, NOAA has “ incredible value, but everyone shits on it.” Then asked Ross, “What’s your philosophy for running it..” The mission is science and technology, which one will you focus on? He wanted the job to be Secretary of Business, but it was not, and he needed science people. Instead, he appointed Barry Myers, CEO of Accuweather who wanted to keep the government from creating free weather apps, so he could charge people money for the free government weather data. Instead of everyone having access to a prediction that a tornado was going to come and destroy your neighborhood, according to Bary Myers, only people who would pay for his app would have access to this information. This is the man who was supposed to serve the public good. Oh and by the way, as CEO of Accuweather, he led a company rife with harassment.
If you are able to shrug off the white-nationalist approach to public communications because of the Trump bump in the stock market, this book is important in reckoning with the destruction of electing people who have no interest in governing at all. Time and time again, Obama administration prepared for the transition only to have Trump officials either not show up for transition meetings, or show up just to say they had no interest in learning anything.
Imagine a new CEO of a hospital coming in, and telling all the doctors their expertise did not matter. Do you want the biggest Trump donors son-in-law doing your heart surgery? Probably not. Unfortunately, the Fifth Risk is no longer the existential risk that Lewis alludes to, but something much darker, scarier, and even more real.
