The Fifth Risk : Undoing Democracy

Author: Lewis, Michael

Political science & theory

Published on 16 November 2019 by Penguin Books Ltd in the United Kingdom.

'Will set your hair on end' Telegraph, Top 50 Books of the Year'I forgot to breathe while reading The Fifth Risk' Michael Hofmann, TLS, Books of the YearThe bestselling, no-holds-barred exposé of the people who are wrecking our democracy, by the master storyteller of our times 'The election happened ... And then there was radio silence.'The

morning after Trump was elected president, the people who ran the US

Department of Energy - an agency that deals with some of the most

powerful risks facing humanity - waited to welcome the incoming

administration's transition team. Nobody appeared. Across the US

government, the same thing happened: nothing.

People don't notice when stuff goes right. That is the stuff government does. It manages everything that underpins our lives from funding free school meals, to policing rogue nuclear activity, to predicting extreme weather events. It steps in where private investment fears to tread, innovates and creates knowledge, assesses extreme long-term risk. And now, government is under attack. By its own leaders.

In The Fifth Risk,

Michael Lewis reveals the combustible cocktail of wilful ignorance and

venality that is fuelling the destruction of a country's fabric. All of this, Lewis shows, exposes America and the world to the biggest risk of all. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.