The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

by Michael Lewis

'Will set your hair on end' Telegraph, Top 50 Books of the Year
'Life is what happens between Michael Lewis books. I forgot to breathe while reading The Fifth Risk' Michael Hofmann, TLS, Books of the Year

The phenomenal new book from the international bestselling author of The Big Short

'The election happened ... And then there was radio silence.'

The morning after Trump was elected president, the people who ran the US Department of Energy - an agency that deals with some of the most powerful risks facing humanity - waited to welcome the incoming administration's transition team. Nobody appeared. Across the US government, the same thing happened: nothing.

People don't notice when stuff goes right. That is the stuff government does. It manages everything that underpins our lives from funding free school meals, to policing rogue nuclear activity, to predicting extreme weather events. It steps in where private investment fears to tread, innovates and creates knowledge, assesses extreme long-term risk.

And now, government is under attack. By its own leaders.

In The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis reveals the combustible cocktail of wilful ignorance and venality that is fuelling the destruction of a country's fabric. All of this, Lewis shows, exposes America and the world to the biggest risk of all. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

• ISBN10: 0241373549
• ISBN13: 9780241373545
• Publish Date: 2 October 2018
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 4 March 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Allen Lane
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 224
• Language: English

Reviews

[Beth C.]

A demonstration, via words, how lacking the average American is in understanding a significant portion of their government. Commerce, Energy, Weather Service - just a few of the departments that do so much more than most realize. And a lack of understanding means a lack of support for all of the things that they (and more) do around our country on a regular basis. This book is reasonably short, and it's well-written and interesting. It should be required reading for every citizen, every high-school and/or college kid, and *anyone* alarmed at the thought that these departments, responsible for billion-dollar budgets that help save lives in a variety of ways, currently either lack leadership or are guarded by the proverbial fox watching over the hen house.

[mercurial]

3.5/5
I had forgotten what a breeze it is to read Michael Lewis' writing. Lewis has a way of providing information that may otherwise be heavy and mundane, in an engaging narration like a friend who is enthusiastically sharing with you on what they just learned today.

I very much enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look at what happened when there is a transfer of power. Naively, I shared the same thought as (omg, no.) Jared Kushner thinking it would be

like a corporate acquisitions or something...everyone [in the federal government] just stayed.

Where I found an odd disconnection is in the last of the three chapters. The chapter provides insight into the four, five characters' involvement in scientific data aggregation in the government. But it doesn't have anything to do with government transition? That left me slightly disappointed as the book feels like an incomplete one on government transition plus a standalone long read on data science - although not a dull subject, I did not sign up for when I started the book.

I would still recommend anyone who wants to know more about how a government works to read, at least the first half, of The Fifth Risk. For the third chapter, maybe look up what Lewis has learned about AccuWeather's commercialization of taxpayer-funded government data instead, unless you are particularly interested in scientific data collection.