The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

I teach in a political science department. I feel like this is a dark secret I sometimes don't want to share with people, particularly on the internet. And, yes, my friends, I am exactly what your parents warned you to watch out for in a political science professor. I am a social welfare loving liberal who thinks the government is responsible for shaping culture and discourse. I'm obsessed with (in no particular order) the census, housing, policy evaluation, crumbling infrastructure, and social inequality. If you take a class from me, regardless of the course title, you will be forced to do a unit on at least one of those topics and you'll have to deal with it because I'm in charge and power hungry. No, it's not because I'm power hungry. It's because these things are important.

Because the government is important, my friends. I can't think of a single thing that I do on a daily basis that isn't in some way the product of some governmental policy, regulation, or funding. My life is a series of governmental handouts. I received free lunch when I went to school at public grade and high schools. I received benefits from the Veterans Administration when I went to college and grad school thanks to my status as the child of a disabled veteran. I received a full academic scholarship to a state university as an undergraduate and my entire graduate school was paid for at yet another state university through assistantships.  My husband and I work at a state university.   

So, yes. I believe in the welfare state and I'm a product of the welfare state. 

I don't know what I expected from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. My neighbor recommended it to me after we'd had our second discussion in a row about the crumbling state of our road* while we were shoveling.  The book basically confirmed what I've been teaching my students all along - the government is responsible for just about everything in our lives and we need to respect it more. The professional bureaucrats who run the executive agencies are incredibly knowledgeable and we should be sending our best and brightest to work in the government and treating them like precious fragile works of art, but instead we we treat our government workers like crap, pay them nothing, and criticize them for every little mistake they make.

Lewis also brings into this hopeless morass of institutional instability the idea that Trump did (does?) not know all that the government did, tried to cheap out on his transition team, and still doesn't have a lot of people in roles that require presidential appointments.  The people who are in appointed positions frequently do not care what the professional bureaucrats have to say, don't use the materials that those professionals have created to ease the transition, and seem single-mindedly focused on dismantling all research having to do with science. 

This book is an easy read, as far as non-fiction goes. Lewis is funny, his writing is clear, and his message is fairly straightforward. But it's not easy in that the knot you've had in your stomach since November 9, 2016 is only going to get tighter and tighter with every page you turn.  And, if you've been worried about infrastructure issues since before the 2016 election, you'll be sad to learn that you were right all along and it's only going to take one terrorist attack to destroy the electrical grid or contaminate the country's water supply and no one is preparing for that eventuality because there are no political appointees to lead the direction.

I don't know that I learned that much in this book, but I'm actually supposed to be an expert on this stuff. What I did learn is that people who are not policy wonks are also interested in this stuff and if you want to add to the catalog of things that are keeping you from falling asleep at night, you might find this book an interesting read.

*Not too long ago, a guy who lives a few houses from us rang our doorbell to ask us to sign a list of signatures he needed to collect to run for reelection to the city council. As we signed, we asked him about our road. It's a major road in town, with a lot of important public services on it, including the fire and police departments, the public library, the post office, and (during warmer months) the Farmers' Market. He sighed and said it was because our water and sewer lines are some of the oldest in the city and if they redo the road they'll have to redo the underground bits. But our water and sewer lines get some of the fewest complaints per capita in the city, so the city council is unwilling to mess with it too much. So that's the explanation.