Summary of Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Michael Lewis's brilliant narrative of the Trump administration's botched presidential transition takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its leaders through willful ignorance and greed. The government manages a vast array of critical services that keep us safe and underpin our lives from ensuring the safety of our food and drugs and predicting extreme weather events to tracking and locating black market uranium before the terrorists do. The Fifth Risk masterfully and vividly unspools the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638152033

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Summary

of

Michael Lewis’s

The Fifth Risk

Table of Contents

Overview

Key Insights

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Important People

Author’s Style

Author’s Perspective

Overview

The Fifth Risk (2018) by Michael Lewis is a journalistic account of how broad swaths of the US government are being ignored or dismantled under Donald Trump’s administration. After shunning the conventions of a presidential transition, Trump and his tiny team assumed stewardship of the government without ever bothering to learn how it works. Lewis spoke to former representatives of three key government agencies to hear the briefings that the Trump team never received. What he learned was deeply unsettling.

One way to conceptualize the American government is as a team of project managers who oversee a huge number of disparate risks. Contagious diseases, natural disasters, terrorists, and many other threats are constantly present to varying degrees. Two million people work for the US government, in part to make sure these bad things never happen, or to mitigate the