The Fifth Risk

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

NY:  WW Norton, 2018

ISBN 9781324002642

(page 22)  The money people donated to his campaign Trump considered, effectively, his own.  He thought the planning and forethought pointless.  At one point he turned to Christie and said, “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”

(41-41)  … We don’t want you to help us understand;  we want to find out who you are and punish you….  According to a former Obama official, he [Thomas Pyle, liaison from Trump to DOE] was replaced by a handful of young ideologues who called themselves “the Beachhead Team.”  “They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official.  “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people in it are stupid and bad,” says another.  They demanded to know the names and salaries of the twenty highest-paid people in the national science labs overseen by the DOE.  They’d eventually delete the contact list with the email addresses of all DOE-funded scientists - apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another.  “These people were insane,” says the former DOE staffer.  “They weren’t prepared.  They didn’t know what they were doing.”

(70)  Asked what it might cost the U.S. government to return Hanford to the standards now legally required of it, [John] MacWilliams said, “A century and a hundred billion dollars.”  And that, he thought, might be a conservative estimate.

Every year the Department of Energy wires 10 percent of its budget, or $3 billion, into this tiny place.

(73)  Kate Brown, Plutopia, comparing Hanford to its Soviet twin Ozersk

(86)  “Someone got up and asked, ‘If you are a store owner after Katrina, should you hike up the price of flashlights?’  Greg Mankiw said yes, without hesitation.”  Ali [Zaidi] remembers thinking:  Greg Mankiw is a good guy.  But that answer is absolutely wrong.  We don’t just have markets.  We have values.  “I started to think, Ah, man, I’m probably not a Republican.”

(108)  In 1872, the average American farmer fed roughly four other people;  now the average farmers feeds about 155 other people.

(162)  The Forbes reporters were accustomed to having rich people mislead them about the size of their wealth, but nearly all of them had been trying to keep their names _off_ the list.  “In the history of the magazine only three people stand out as having made huge efforts to get on, or end up higher than they belonged,” said [Dan] Alexander.  “One was [Saudi] Prince Alwaleed.  The second was Donald Trump.  And the third was Wilbur Ross.”

(178)  “We asked the question:  What causes excessive use of police force?”  Combing the data from the ten cities, a team of researchers from several American universities found a pattern that would have been hard to spot with the naked eye.  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."

(186)  The Climate Corporation had turned farming into decision science, and a matter of probabilities.  The farmer was no longer playing roulette but blackjack.  And David Friedberg was helping him to count the cards.

NB:  The Climate Corporation does micro-weather to help farmers plant, fertilize, and harvest at the optimal times.

(191)  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.

(194)  The relationship between the people and their government troubled her [Kathy Sullivan].  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.”

(207)  “A government agency does not have an incentive to hype.  Private companies have an incentive to hype.  The problem when you hype is that you reduce confidence in _all_ weather forecasts, because no one knows the source of the information.”

Lewis reports that at both the DOE and NOAA, the Trmpists were more interested in quashing climate change work more than anything else.  He looked at DOE, Department of Ag, and Department of Commerce.