The Fifth Risk

• ocean11

  2018-11-05
  And so you might have good reason to pray for a tornado, whether it comes in the shape of swirling winds, or a politician. You imagine the thing doing the damage that you would like to see done, and no more. It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you.
• ocean11

  2018-11-05
  At the same time David Friedberg was helping farmers to secure their immediate economic future, he was threatening their identity. Your family has been tilling this same soil for a century, and yet this data-crunching machine I’ve built in just a few years can do it better. The phrase was a whisper underlying every conversation he’d had with a farmer.
• ocean11

  2018-11-05
  One senior official at the Department of Commerce at the time was struck by how far this one company in the private sector had intruded into what was, in the end, a matter of public safety. “You’re essentially taking a public good that’s been paid for with taxpayer dollars and restricting it to the privileged few who want to make money off it,” he said........Another McKinsey study estimated that the entire industry generated somewhere between $2 billion and $4 billion a year in revenue and was growing fast. With reason. The annual cost of natural disasters in the 1980s had been $50 billion. Hurricane Sandy alone inflicted over $65 billion worth of damage. The private weather industry, unlike the National Weather Service, has a financial interest in catastrophe. The more spectacular and ...
• ocean11

  2018-11-05
  Barry Myers liked to say that he was in competition with the federal government. If so, the competition was bizarre: the U.S. Department of Commerce gave him, for free, most of the raw material he needed to create his product. Without the weather satellites, weather radar, weather buoys, and weather balloons, there would be no weather forecasting worth listening to, much less paying for. Whatever AccuWeather—and any other private weather forecaster—might be doing to refine the National Weather Service’s forecasts also depended on having those forecasts in the first place. “If the Weather Service forecast wasn’t there, all the private weather forecasts would get worse,” says David Kenny..........In 2005 Rick Santorum, a senator from AccuWeather’s home state of Pennsylvania and a recipient...
• ocean11

  2018-11-05
  There were hundreds of fantastically important success stories in the United States government. They just never got told.Max knew an astonishing number of them. He’d detected a pattern: a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments. People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed. That was maybe Max’s biggest challenge: explaining the value of this enterprise at the center of a democratic society to people who either took it for granted or imagined it as a pernicious force in their lives over which they had no control.