The Fifth Risk

I am reading a very interesting book written by Michael Lewis, who also wrote Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side, and The Undoing Project.

For the first section of the book, The Fifth Risk, he interviewed John MacWilliams who worked at the Department of Energy at the time of the transition of the government. Lewis asked MacWilliams what he considered the five biggest risks in today’s government.  Lewis soon learned the first two are nuclear weapons (there have been at least three very notable nuclear waste accidents as risks..especially Hanford Washington) and of course, climate change.

Trump appointees were few and far between. Those who did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace.  Some even threw away the briefings books that had been prepared for them by law. Across all departments of the government similar stories were playing out

In the Agriculture department, for example, the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at the Department of Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.

Lewis asked MacWilliams, who was the chief risk officer, what the top five risks facing us were.  The first was the management of nuclear weapons and climate change, the second largest risk he listed was North Korea. Iran is the third biggest risk. Fourth of the top threats is the electrical grid. But the fifth risk is “Project management”

Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters, if your ambition is to maximize short term gain without regard to long term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better to never understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. 

I suggest everyone who cares about the kind of world we live in and work in,..read this book.

There is a telling example of this Trumpian impulse. ….the desire not to know…in a small DOE (Department of Energy) program that goes by its acronym ARPA-E. The program was conceived by the George W. Bush administration as an energy equivalent of DARPA ---the Defense Department research-grant program was trivial…$300 million a year. It made small grants to researchers who had scientifically plausible, wildly creative ideas that might change the world. Much of the time, ARPA-E was your only place for a resource. 

There are lots of seriously smart people with bold ideas that might change the world.  The idea behind ARPA-E is to find the best of those ideas that the free market had declined to finance and make sure they were given a chance.  Only two out of each hundred who have applied,  have been approved. 

The Trump administration unveiled its budget for the Department of Energy. ARPA-E had since won the praise of business leaders from Bill Gates to Lee Scott, the famous CEO of Walmart, to Fred Smith, the Republican founder of FedEx, who said that “pound for pound , dollar for dollar, activity for activity, it’s hard to find a more effective thing government has done than ARPA-E”

Trumps first budget eliminated ARPA-E altogether.  It cut funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of six thousand of their people. It eliminated all research on climate change. It halved the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster. “All these risks are science based” said MacWilliams when he saw the budget. “You can’t gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country."

But you can. Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science.  

Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire….to remain ignorant. Donald Trump didn’t invent this desire. He was just its ultimate expression.