The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy Paperback – 5 Dec. 2019

This well researched book provides vivid examples of the amazing services good Government provides every day. It also shows why we rarely hear of them: there are too many people in the private sector with a vested interest in having us believe Government is bad. It shows we need to be more critical and ask ‘who benefits?’ when we are told of anecdotal failure in Government and then expected to generalize credulously.It also shows the corruption and state capture occurring under Trump in the US as it did under say Zuma in South Africa - something I never thought possible to this extent.Michael Lewis is a brilliant author and his books should all be on the school curriculum.

The brief book is well researched (though it lacks notes, has very few footnotes and for that matter lacks an index); the narrative is witty and reads pleasantly; the text is informal, some might say very informal with a fair share of four letter words; finally the story unfolds not in the abstract but through its cast of characters - dedicated and talented civil servants and so acquires a vivid, conversational style.The book juxtaposes talented individuals in selected government departments, committed to the public service and the public good, telling their particular professional stories with virtually absent transitional Trump teams in the departments and ridiculous appointments in government service by the Trump teams. When Trump administration appointees to government service are not simply indifferent or neglectful they are something more sinister, they actively undermine them as was the case of an appointee to head a government service who consciously undermined it because he perceived that it was antagonistic to the company he previously owned and from which he parachuted to the service.The book draws its material from three government departments corresponding to the three chapters of the book, namely the Department of Energy which works on the two biggest risks to human existence, nuclear weapons and climate change; the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA); and the Commerce Department which does not work with business but produces public goods that are of value to Business. The Commerce Department includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) inside which resides the weather service. The protagonists from the Commerce Department belong to the NOAA and the weather service.To conclude the review and provide a flavor of the book, I draw from the chapter on USDA.Into USDA jobs, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like 'pleasant demeanor' listed in their resumes. In many cases the new appointees demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture. Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries. What these people had in common was loyalty to Donald Trump. BY late summer 2017, of the fourteen senior jobs at the USDA that required Senate confirmation, only one had been filled: former Georgia governor, Sonny Perdue was named Secretary of Agriculture in April.

Bob Woodward's 'Fear' was the big picture - what happens when a demagogue who doesn't give a tuppeny damn about government is supposed to be running the government but doesn't; Woodward describes policy being made on the fly, and the problems of managing someone who shoots from the hip but has a porous memory for anything that doesn't glorify him.his book looks through the other end of the telescope - at a few government services that keep the entire country running safely, they've been put in the charge of a bunch of Trump loyalists who couldn't be bothered to show up to the post-election briefing; services that don't sound very glamorous until you read Lewis's accounts of how much their quiet services stop farmers from being wiped out, towns being torn apart, gets poor people fed, stops non-toxic food on our plates … and nobody will notice until they're no longer there. He takes just two or three examples; tells them with his usual engaging delivery; and leaves you thinking 'if this is what can happen to X, and Y, and Z, what on earth is happening to A, B, C, D …Essential, and engaging - I wish it hadn't had to be written, but am glad that it has.

I’m a big fan of the author and always keen to read his latest books but I have to admit this isn’t my favourite by a long shot. I would give it 3.5 stars if I could. Some good enough parts that it was worth a read but comparing to his other books, this is probably the least interesting of his that I’ve read.I think I was expecting the book to be more based on Trump but in fact it focuses on the various government departments and some of the people who work within them, Lewis’s ‘unsung heros’. The references to Trump are more in passing around cuts to funding and lack of interest from his administration.To caveat, I’m from the UK, so perhaps stories of US Government departments were always going to be less interesting to me.It does feel a bit like a collection of stories from different departments as opposed to one long narrative. There were parts that were interesting, about services provided that you wouldn’t ordinarily give much thought to and some of the personal stories were interesting to hear.However, overall, I would say if there are other Lewis books that you haven’t read, start with those rather than this one.