Michael Lewis - The Premonition

Michael Lewiss global bestselling books lift the lid on the biggest stories of our times. They include Flash Boys, a game-changing expos of high-speed scamming; The Big Short, which was made into a hit Oscar-winning film; Liars Poker, the book that defined the excesses of the 1980s; and, most recently, The Fifth Risk, revealing what happens when democracy unravels. Michael Lewis was born in New Orleans and educated at Princeton University and the London School of Economics.

The Fifth Risk

The Undoing Project

Flash Boys

Boomerang

The Big Short

Home Game

The Blind Side

Coach

Moneyball

Next

The New New Thing

Losers

Pacific Rift

The Money Culture

Liars Poker

Panic

To my parents, Diana Monroe Lewis and J. Thomas Lewis.

Thank you for surviving this.

Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to praya place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures.

REN LERICHE,
The Philosophy of Surgery, 1951

This book began with an unholy mix of obligation and opportunism. During the first half of the Trump administration Id written a book, The Fifth Risk, that framed the federal government as a manager of a portfolio of existential risks: natural disasters, nuclear weapons, financial panics, hostile foreigners, energy security, food security, and on and on and on. The federal government wasnt just this faceless gray mass of two million people. Nor was it some well-coordinated deep state seeking to subvert the will of the people. It was a collection of experts, among them some real heroes, whom we neglected and abused at our peril. Yet wed been neglecting and abusing them for more than a generation. That behavior climaxed with the Trump administration. My book asked: What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?

I had no clue what was going to happen next. I assumed something was bound to happen. But it didntnot really. For the better part of three years, the Trump administration got lucky. That luck ran out in late 2019, as a freshly mutated virus in China made its way toward the United States. This was just the sort of management test Id imagined when writing The Fifth Risk. How could I not write about it? But as I got into it, and found these wonderful characters to tell the story through, it became clear that Trumps approach to government management was only a part of the story, and maybe not even the bigger part. As one of my characters put it, Trump was a comorbidity.

Back in October 2019nearly three years into the Trump administration, and before anyone involved was aware of the novel coronavirusa collection of very smart people had gathered to rank all the countries in the world, in order of their readiness for a pandemic. A group called the Nuclear Threat Initiative partnered with Johns Hopkins and The Economist Intelligence Unit to create what amounted to a preseason college football ranking for one hundred ninety-five countries. The Global Health Security Index, it was called. It was a massive undertaking involving millions of dollars and hundreds of researchers. They created stats and polled the experts. They ranked the United States first. Number 1. (The United Kingdom was Number 2.)

Critics quibbled with the rankings. The complaints werent all that different from the complaints you hear before every college football season. For years the University of Texas football team, with its vast resources and sway with voters, always seemed ranked more highly at the start of the season than at the end. The United States was the Longhorns of pandemic preparedness. It was rich. It had special access to talent. It enjoyed special relationships with the experts whose votes determined the rankings.

Then the game was played. The preseason rankings no longer mattered. Neither, really, did the excuses and blame-casting and rationalizations. As the legendary football coach Bill Parcells once said, You are what your record says you are. At last count the United States, with a bit more than 4 percent of the worlds population, had a bit more than 20 percent of its COVID-19 deaths. In February 2021, The Lancet published a long critique of the U.S. pandemic performance. By then 450,000 Americans had died. The Lancet pointed out that if the COVID death rate in the United States had simply tracked the average of the other six G7 nations, 180,000 of those people would still be alive. Missing Americans, they called them. But why stop there? Before the pandemic, a panel of public-health experts had judged the United States to be more prepared for a pandemic than other G7 nations. In a war with a virus, we were not expected merely to fare as well as other rich countries. We were expected to win.

I like to think that my job is mainly to find the story in the material. I always hope that story will wind up being about more than what I think its aboutand that the reader will bring to it his own sense-making apparatus and find meanings in it missed by its author. But that doesnt mean that I dont form some opinion of what its about. I think this particular story is about the curious talents of a society, and how those talents are wasted if not led. Its also about how gaps open between a societys reputation and its performance. After a catastrophic season, management always huddles up to figure out what needs to be changed. If this story speaks to that management in any way, I hope it is to say: There are actually some things to be proud of. Our players arent our problem. But we are what our record says we are.

Laura Glass was thirteen years old and entering the eighth grade at Jefferson Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when she looked over her fathers shoulder to see what he was working on. Bob Glass was a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, created in the mid-1940s to figure out everything that needed to be figured out about nuclear weapons, apart from the creation of the plutonium and uranium inside them. It was Sandias engineers whod calculated how to drop a hydrogen bomb from a plane without killing the pilot, for instance. By the mid-1980s, when Bob Glass arrived, Sandia had a reputation as the place you went with a top secret problem after everyone else in the netherworld of national security had failed to solve it. It attracted people who followed wherever their minds led them, at the expense of pretty much everything else. People like Bob Glass. When she peered over her fathers shoulder, Laura Glass didnt always understand what she was looking at. But it was never dull.