The Fifth Risk

The federal government offers the only hope of a coordinated, intelligent response to threats to the system: there is no private-sector mechanism. To that end the DOE had begun to gather the executives of the utility companies, to educate them about the threats they face. “They all sort of said, ‘But is this really real?’” said MacWilliams. “You ge

There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. “Program management” is not just program management. “Program management” is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. Some of the things any inco

Junk science will be used to muddy issues like childhood nutrition. Maybe sodium isn’t as bad for kids as people say! There’s no such thing as too much sugar! The science will suddenly be “unclear.” There will no longer be truth and falsehood. There will just be stories, with two sides to them.

In college he read The Other America, Michael Harrington’s account of the lives of the American poor, and listened to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, with its bracing call to public service.

Concannon was deeply disappointed in Perdue’s speech. He saw it as pure politics, not motivated by any concern for children’s welfare. “Look, you can have confidence in the career people,” he said. “Because most of them have migrated to where they are out of desire. They believe in what they are doing.” About the new political people who might repl

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 ha

A United States congressman had asked her why the taxpayer needed to fund the National Weather Service when he could get his weather from AccuWeather. Where on earth did he think AccuWeather—or the apps or the Weather Channel— got their weather? Where was AccuWeather when winds of two hundred and something miles per hour were churning through an Am

“The idea that if you push a network a certain way it might collapse. Is the network stable or unstable? It’s a lot like the question I was asking about weather forecasts.” A terrorist network, like a thunderstorm, might be chaotic. Terrorist networks, along with a lot of other security matters, might be better understood through chaos theory. “If

At any rate, the serious risk in Iran wasn’t that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand his nuclear scientists’ reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians’ obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal.† Released from t

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.