The Fifth Risk |
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19 August 2020
Michael Lewis is admittedly one of my favorite authors. His book on Kahneman and Tversky is the single best bromance written. The guy writes heroic nerds better than any nonfiction author out there these days, which is probably why several of his other books (Moneyball and The Big Short) have been made into movies starring Brad Pitt. So it was not really a question of if I would read The Fifth Risk, but when.
So I finally got to reading this latest from Lewis, and it started on such an anti-Trump bent I was deflated. Anti-Trump screeds are not hard to find, and I was afraid this was just going to be another. I find it better for my mental health to be involved in politics in a time-staggered way, that is, as history. But I stuck in there and Michael Lewis did not disappoint, writing tale after tale of people doing useful things with data collected by the US government. One of the things I could really get behind the Obama administration about was their professed desire for data transparency. I attended many a hackathon devoted solely to doing things with government data. Of course these professions rang hollow when the White House talked about jobs "created or saved" rather than giving us honest job creation number, or when Edward Snowden revealed that our government was colluding with others to violate the privacy of our own data. Still there were heros, and government data collection improved even if the government itself was doing unsavory things with it. Lewis writes admirable tales of those heros.
The Trump administration has a strong anti-knowledge and anti-government bent that Lewis does his best to demonstrate is destructive. And the data-loving nerd in me can get wholeheartedly behind that. But while not having the data the government could have collected is painful to me, I cannot agree with confiscating taxes from people to pay for it. This, unfortunately, is not just what the Trump administration is doing however. Far more insidious is hiding government data from the public but allowing private companies that profit from repackaging it to have that data to sell to the public that paid for it's collection.
I can't say I'm that surprised at how Trump's people are trying to scam us. Some animals are more equal than others ... that is, once an organized government exists there is always a chance that pigs will seize it and just use it for our exploitation. I think most would agree that this is a possibility, whereas I would argue it's an inevitability. Hence my strong distrust of governments. Lewis certainly believes the pigs of the Trump administration shouldn't have the reins, but perhaps retains too much trust that with the "right leadership" everything would be hunky dory.
I still definitely recommend reading The Fifth Risk.