The Fifth Risk

Undoing Democracy

By: Michael Lewis

Narrated by: Victor Bevine

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, read by Victor Bevine.

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.

Audio updated in December 2019 to include a bonus afterword that the author has added in light of the recent turbulent political landscape in America.

©2018 Michael Lewis (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

Jaw-dropping ... genuinely stopped me in my tracks. (Stefano Hatfield)

Given that we now seem to be inhabiting a somewhat medieval world of plague and portent, I'd like to make the case for the prophetic powers of the US journalist Michael Lewis ... In December the notion [of the fifth risk] seemed wildly far-fetched. Four months on, it seems we will get the chance to find out if he was on the money. (Tim Adams)

A wonderful love letter to government

If you want a book that will help you appreciate everything government accomplishes, and the inherent risks of handing it over to the ignorant and malicious, this is the book for you.

Ignorance is Bliss, Until...

Superb in every way. The problem is that many of the people who most need to read/listen to this will probably not, for all of the reasons elucidated in this book.

Good sub-stories but not cohesive

The book starts off well and starts showing how the current leadership is doing things and how it is undermining all the previous doings of past leaderships. The listener gets a sense of things are heading for the worse and a sense of doom.

However after the first couple of chapters the stories are more about how someones capabilities was undermined and how they were mistreated by the current leadership. It doesn't really tie it in to the democracy or how those actions are 'undoing democracy' and only just gives a feeling that a wrong was done.

In all it leaves more questions and concerns than answers and you feel very incomplete after listening to this.

Gripping and timely

I'm not American and this book was written long before the most recent election. But, to me, it could have been written this morning. An eye-opening account of one of the most insidious risks to America and the world - the exploitation of ignorance to allow grifters to capture the levers of power to profit at the expense of society's progress.