Scan barcode
A review by cbarsotti
The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis
5.0
While the blurbs talk a lot about the Trump administration, I feel like this was a publisher's move in order to garner attention and sales. The book merely used the Trump administration to contextualized the issue of the dearth of knowledge in America and the public at large. Interviews with Chris Christie in the beginning of the book paint the administration as willfully ignorant whereas later opinions suggest more malicious profiteering.
Read this if you are interested in learning about some of the less known federal functions. The book highlights how unusually truant the administration was during transition but otherwise 80% of it is devoted to the inner-workings of departments and the people who ran them.
Underlying the whole book is the importance of science, the importance of looking ahead, of investing in places that the private sector never touches, of freely sharing data, and how this is contrasted by anti-government and anti-expert sentiment. I'm not much for government lionizing and there are a lot of ways that federal programs act harmfully (See FEMA) but there are a lot of functions that can be improved by making it easier for others to understand as well as get involved.
Read this if you are interested in learning about some of the less known federal functions. The book highlights how unusually truant the administration was during transition but otherwise 80% of it is devoted to the inner-workings of departments and the people who ran them.
Underlying the whole book is the importance of science, the importance of looking ahead, of investing in places that the private sector never touches, of freely sharing data, and how this is contrasted by anti-government and anti-expert sentiment. I'm not much for government lionizing and there are a lot of ways that federal programs act harmfully (See FEMA) but there are a lot of functions that can be improved by making it easier for others to understand as well as get involved.