The Fifth Risk is Here
posted on in: Michael, Lewis, Fifth, Risk, Aram, local, civic, Information, NOAA, weather, forecast, government, Victor, Orbán and AccuWeather.
~344 words, about a 2 min read.
"The Fifth Risk" by Michael Lewis explores the government's civil servants jobs and looks at them from the perspective of a complex risk management system. The government is striving to minimize harm when things go awry, ensure stakeholder interests, and prevent catastrophic failures from occurring. Importantly, civil servants collect, analyze, and publish data to the public such as the job numbers every quarter.
Cooking those numbers would undermine faith and trust in such institutions, further eroding confidence and belief in democracy. I want to highlight, thats the goal of modern reactionary Republicanism: break agencies and government programs and point out the dysfunction of them as a justification for gutting Social Security and Medicare, food stamps, and social aid while giving away tax cuts to billionaires and millionaires.
Victor Orbán of Hungary took one of the post-Communist world's greatest success stories and hallowed it out. A once-thriving democracy had rotted and twisted into the European Union's only autocracy. Orbán did some obvious hijacking of government functions, but also much more subtly in other areas. "like its tax administration and the offices regulating higher education" were replaced by loyalists.
We saw an example in President Trump's first term. President Trump replaced the director of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who are responsible for the National Weather Service, with Barry Myers, an executive vice president of AccuWeather. Mr. Myers attempted to shut out all other weather forecast competitors and favor AccWeather.
Setting up a site with boring stuff like local flood analysis may not sound like a big deal if a crony loyalist for the Trump administration decides to shut off access and sell it to insurance companies. But it may be very important to a person buying their first home in an increasingly riskier flood zone. A free market can't function well when information pertaining to risk is not publicly available.
You can fight against this form of corruption be setting up sites at a local level in the event Trump installs sycophants in data-collecting roles.