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Michael Lewis

Monday 2nd of March 2026

2016 Presidential election I think of this as echoing of the 2008 financial crisis. The marketplace for politicians just did something as weird as the marketplace for securities did, and it did it in part because of what the market did. Without the financial crisis, we don't get Trump as president. There are other necessary conditions. But it's definitely a necessary condition. Michael Lewis, Financial Times, December 10-11, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
2016 Presidential election It feels like we are in a world where, to me, some meaningful part of the electorate is beyond reasoning with – beyond fact, anti-science. Michael Lewis, Financial Times, December 10-11, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Dysfunction in government  The United States government might be the most complicated organization on the face of the earth. Its two million federal employees take orders from four thousand political appointees. Dysfunction is baked into the structure of the thing: subordinates know that their bosses will be replaced every four or eight years, and that the direction of their enterprises might change overnight – with an election or a war or some other political event. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com
Farming In 1872, the average American farmer fed roughly four other people; now the average farmer feeds about 155 other people. It's not just people and plants that have become more productive. In 1950, the average cow yielded 5,300 pounds of milk. In 2016, the average cow yielded 23,000 pounds of milk. A Wisconsin Holstein recently yielded nearly 75,000 pounds of milk in a year, which amounts to roughly 24 gallons a day. Her name is Gigi. You can thank her later. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com
Nukes In 1962 a worker at Hanford [nuclear production plant] named Harold Aardal, exposed to a blast of nuclear radiation, was whisked to a hospital, where he was told he was perfectly okay except that he was sterile—and it didn't even make the news. Instead, Hanford researchers in the late 1960s went to a local prison and paid inmates to allow the irradiation of their testicles, to see just how much radiation a man can receive before the tails fall from his sperm. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com
Statistics People don't want the right answers. They want a story. They don't think in statistical terms. Michael Lewis, Financial Times, December 10-11, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Trumpism And he came to see there was nothing arbitrary or capricious about the Trump administration's attitude toward public data. Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company. “The NOAA webpage used to have a link to weather forecasts,” he said. “It was highly popular. I saw it had been buried. And I asked: Now why would they bury that?” Then he realized: the man Trump nominated to run NOAA thought that people who wanted a weather forecast should have to pay him for it. There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn't between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission and the people who were in it for the money. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com
Trumpism In 2016, after several counties in North Carolina suffered severe flooding, the state tried to distribute federal disaster-relief food-benefit cards on the day of the presidential election, to give poor people a choice between eating and voting. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com
Trumpism Jenny Hopkinson, a Politico  reporter, obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into USDA [Dept. of Agriculture] jobs, some of which paid $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long- haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their rêsumê. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com
Trumpism No one in the Trump administration was likely to ever come right out and say: “We want to let kids and old people go hungry.” But, obviously, they might run the program so ineptly that it lost its political support. And then kids and old people would go hungry. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com
 
Trumpists Virtually all the people Trump had sent into the Department of Agriculture were white men in their twenties. They exhibited no knowledge of, or interest in, the problems of rural Americans. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com