Book of the week
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis Allen Lane 224pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99
Michael Lewis “prides himself on being able to make anything exciting”, said Josh Glancy in The Sunday Times. The acclaimed non-fiction writer has previously tackled the bond market ( Liar’s Poker), baseball stats ( Moneyball) and behavioural economics ( The Undoing Project). In his latest book, he applies himself to what might seem like “the most turgid subject of them all – bureaucracy”. Although in part about Donald Trump’s presidency, The Fifth Risk is also an extended “civics lesson” in which Lewis immerses himself in the “gills and guts” of the US government. He has interviewed scores of civil servants and established “what it is that giant, nebulous departments such as commerce, energy or agriculture actually do”. His alarming conclusion is that thanks to the complacency and disorganisation of Trump’s administration, whole swathes of the government are ceasing to function.
Lewis begins his story in the run-up to the 2016 election, with Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, starting to spend on a transition team in the event of a Trump victory, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “You’re stealing my f***ing money”, Trump reportedly yelled – and sacked Christie shortly after the vote. “The transition proceeded accordingly – which is to say, shambolically.” Of the 700 key governmental appointments a president is required to make, nearly half remain unfilled two years later. And where Trump has managed to appoint people, they tend to be either grossly unqualified (the boss of a scented candle company in a key role at the Department of Agriculture, say), or the equivalent of a “wrecking crew”.
This book will keep you up at night, said Harriet Alexander in The Daily Telegraph. The US government, Lewis explains, manages a vast portfolio of risks. If key agencies are headed by people actively hostile to their aims, then the chances of some unforeseen disaster – a power station exploding, say, or a bridge collapsing – increase exponentially. This is the “fifth risk” of the title: an unanticipated catastrophe. Lewis’s picture of Trump’s administration is “hair-raising”, but his book fails to address a larger point, said Justin Webb in The Times: that the distrust of government that swept Trump to power has some justification. The fact is that the land of the free is “staggeringly overgoverned” – “awash with overlapping regulations and fussy multilayered governance”. Most of Trump’s reforms may be ham-fisted, but the system is so complex and dysfunctional that it may make no difference at all.