The Fifth Risk

If nothing else scares you about the current administration, reading this book WILL do the job. I have read several "current" books about what is happening to the government but Michael Lewis does a terrific job of presenting absolutely frightening material in a fascinatingly readable form. It is a book that can be read quickly but what it does to your thinking means that actions need to be taken by all of us, soon, to stop the destruction of so many essential parts of the government that we, as the general public, just have not nearly understood enough about or appreciated.

If you think that Trump as president is just an unfortunate episode in US history without any serious long term consequences, then you need to read this book. Michael Lewis does an excellent job describing the transition that is supposed to happen when a new president takes office and the poor excuse of what actually did happen when Trump was inaugurated. But this book is not just a rant against Trump, but also a testimony to all the complexities of the US government and the importance of keeping it working with competent administrators. Entertaining and very scary.

It was an interesting experience to read this book, published in 2018 in reaction to the first Trump Presidency, in 2025. It is essentially a bit of well-written propaganda (or an emotional sop) to the Trump Derangement Syndrome that gripped half of America. Lewis, who can write well, but not honestly, cleaves to the party line that Trump, and the populism which brought him to power, could be fatal to America. It is the book equivalent of "but seriously, we can't let this guy get the nuclear codes". You have to triangulate an objective meaning from it, because it is so deeply partisan, but doing so is an interesting exercise.

As a younger man I thought the deep state was an aspect of the intelligence community. I realise now that it is show more the entire civil service. The new, post-Clinton managerialists believe government has become so complicated that it doesn't need politics anymore, but competence. Politics is in fact a danger. The book's sub-title is "Undoing Democracy", which does not appear on its UK cover, but ironically that is the argument the impliedly advances. Technocrats and academics should be given free reign to pursue their intelligent, righteous, worthy passions - because in Lewis' book, America's civil service is staffed entirely by martyrs of genius - and people in MAGA hats are obviously just trying to spoil that out of spite and stupidity. Lewis is entirely unwilling to see the other side of the coin: that whilst living standards of its citizens decline, the federal budget is increasingly out of control, and contains many expenditures that are so wild as to defy belief. As a non-American, I have been victim to this expenditure: I do not appreciate US funding of international transexual advocacy, for example, and I would rather the children in my country were not castrated by ideologues. And so on.

Lewis clings to the favoured logic of the centrists and much of the left: the logic of the emergency. Everything is about saving human life. Everything is potentially fatal. That's why you can't get politics involved. That's why rednecks shouldn't be allowed to vote. This argument is inherently political, of course, but revealing that conceit would expose the nakedness of Lewis' position, and those like him. Because the logic of emergency dictates that at the same time you effectively disenfranchise that swathe of the electorate which votes the wrong way, you should also grant the government greater powers. In fact, you need those powers for the disenfranchisement. This is not explicitly stated in Lewis' book, but his observations will lead us there.

The Fifth Risk is essentially a book advocating for the necessity and importance of the deep state, and arguing that democracy is a risk to that deep state. That's all there is to it. Benjamin Franklin was right: you cannot trade freedom for security, but that is the path we are on, and Lewis is clapping away at the thought.

His strongest points lie in his reasonable distrust of corporatism and technocracy. To the extent the deep state is dismantled, there will be terrible human beings at the helm of immoral corporations seeking to profit - and seeking profit only - from the ruins. That is an entirely justifiable concern. It is that potential profit which underpins their endorsement of MAGA, of course. However, Lewis' wariness of these corporations does not extend to those on his side. Goldman Sachs, for example, is fine.

The serious issue here is metaphysical, because if Lewis' centrist managerial non-politics is validated by the fact it saves lives, the real political question is deeper still. What is the life we are saving actually for? What do we believe in, and who are we as a people? That is not something reflected in the mainstream political spectrum of any country in the West. We are not allowed to believe, unless it is belief in Israel and the guilt of our own native population. And who are we? We are cattle, and we should do as we are told, for our own good, because the world is more complicated and dangerous than we could understand.

This book, read carefully, is a sign that one of the biggest risks to the West has already manifested. show less

Although really it should be called "The Fifth Risk: Undoing Government" because Lewis' main point - illustrated by many very scary examples - is that federal government, that favourite whipping post of the right, is in the process of being dismantled by people who don't even know what it does. The problem that Lewis highlights is that government departments - he focuses on Commerce (which has very little to do with Business), Agriculture (which is not just the department that deals with farming) and Energy (think cleaning up nuclear waste rather than regulating oil) - do such a a wide range of both vital and tremendously useful stuff that it is almost impossible for career veterans to understand them properly, let alone political show more appointees

Sounds like these behemoths could do with some simplification and reorganisation then? There's certainly an argument for it. But to reorganise requires understanding, care, thought and intelligence. None of which Trump appointees have.

Have you wondered why Federal Government's response to COVID-19 has been, at best, laggardly and at worst criminally negligent? The answers are all here. As Lewis presents it, ignorance is not just an unfortunate side effect of the Trump regime but a deliberate policy. If you don't understand an issue, you don't have to deal with it. If you aren't even aware of an issue you can brush it aside. Ignorance is easier; ignorance is bliss. Experts are troublemakers - much easier to get rid of them and replace them with fawning lackeys. The COVID response is disaster enough, but you are left being glad that at least there hasn't been a nuclear accident to deal with; because, for the first time in history, the US probably wouldn't be able to

So whilst Trump appointees such as Rick Perry, Barry Myers and Wilbur Ross may entertainingly come across as, in turn, incompetent, corrupt and hopelessly out of his depth, that isn't really the point. The point is that you have to at least understand what government does when you are supposed to be running it. You have to do the work. As we all know, Donald Trump isn't interested in work and is pulling this edifice down without even knowing it

Scary stuff indeed. Minus half a star because it feels like a combination of 1 long and 2 mid length magazine pieces. So structurally its far from perfect. But the content is devastating show less

The transition teams for the newly elected Presidents Bush and Obama showed up at the Departments of Energy, Commerce and Agriculture the day after those candidates became President-elect. The day after the 2016 Presidential Election officials of those departments were prepared to meet the Trump transition team, but nobody showed up. This was the first sign of the indifference and incompetence of our current administration. Michael Lewis does a fine job of showing how important our federal agencies are and how much of what they do is not known to the general public. Now we see that the very people chosen to head those agencies by the President also don't know and don't care. The 5th risk title came from a question the author asked show more Energy dept. officials. The first risk was a lost or stolen nuclear device and the next ones were out of control nukes in North Korea or Iran but the fifth risk was simple bad management. That is the one we have. Managers who don't know what they are doing and don't care. Read this book. It will scare you. show less

Entertaining and well written, like all of Lewis's books. Particularly interesting are the discussions of the DOE and NOAA. Parts of it seem a little dated, in 2019. My main criticisms are that Lewis omits the broader context, comparing Trump to Obama but not to previous Presidents, especially Republicans. By 2019 it has become clear that the Trump administration isn't an exception; rather in corruption and willful ignorance it has achieved the ne plus ultra of Republican governance philosophy. Lewis is also insufficiently critical of the government programs he studies; obviously not on climate change but sometimes there really are two sides to an issue. There are a few extended digressions, but I'll take a Michael Lewis digression any day.

It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you... It is what you never learned that might have saved you. This is the warning and the tag line of Michael Lewis' new book, The Fifth Risk. Lewis does a masterful job of outlining just what some of the departments of the federal government (Energy, Agriculture,and Commerce) do and how dedicated the individuals are who devout their extensive knowledge and passion to the operation of these agencies. This highlights the warning of the book by detailing how the new administration showed no interest in the baton passing of the government transition program. Various interviews of accomplished officials revealed how tenuous some of the risks are to our future: nuclear accidents, electrical grid show more sabotage , and the threats of North Korea and Iran seem logical but the new risk has to do with the fallout if the work of the government is not continued. Lewis contends that the new administration prefers ignorance. "If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems,” he writes. “There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier.” Recommended reading show less