Now hurricane season in New Orleans is a much more sophisticated risk management enterprise. “When I was growing up, nobody did anything. Lewis lives in Berkeley now, but he was born in hurricane-hit New Orleans. He thinks we should err on the side of caution when pathogens emerge: the US should have locked down schools while it studied swine flu in 2009. He wants more tracking of diseases, better communication of statistics. If we want to lead the lives we’re leading, we just have to get much more sophisticated about how we manage the risk.” And there’s certainly no social consensus . So, as the pandemic eases, Lewis worries that the experience is being wasted. “Nobody seems to have taken that seriously.” Actually, he says, energy secretary Jennifer Granholm did “read The Premonition and The Fifth Risk”, and wanted a key cybersecurity role to be made non-political.īut the Senate disagreed, deciding it would make the role seem unimportant. Lewis did suggest the takeaways were that the US should have fewer political appointees and more civil servants, so that there would be more experience and fewer “pleasers”. The Biden administration, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to have “any interest in reforming the CDC” Congress has increased its funding by billions of dollars, “which is not what my book would suggest you should do”.
It’s like people think it’s in the hands of the gods.” “Why isn’t the mayor of Miami, or the governor of Florida, being asked about that? They’re not being punished at all. “You look at the map of death rates across the United States, there are such dramatic differences from place to place. “I’m really surprised,” says Lewis, who is genial even when in despair. Today those nettles remain firmly ungrasped. It was also a failure to learn from history, namely the 1918 flu epidemic, which showed that places which embraced social distancing did better. It was the dysfunctional federal agency the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which demanded a monopoly on testing then couldn’t produce a working test. It wasn’t Donald Trump (he was just a “comorbidity”). His most recent book, The Premonition, published last year, unpicked what really went wrong with the US response to the coronavirus. Most of his 18 books are bestsellers.īut do people really listen? When I meet Lewis in London’s Covent Garden over breakfast, he’s having scrambled eggs – and a few doubts. The data-driven baseball manager Billy Beane in Moneyball, the wacky contrarian investors in The Big Short – Lewis made them superstars, and their stories made him richer even than his brief stint as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers did.
Lewis is arguably the best in the world at finding underdogs and oddballs, and spinning their triumphs into smart entertainment.
Real life is not stranger than fiction, but when Michael Lewis tells it, it is more exciting.
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