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21 " If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date. "
― Michael Lewis , The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy
22 " At one point he turned to Christie and said, “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves. "
23 " All good inventions come from something personal,” she said. “People create things because it’s personal. "
24 " The rapacity of companies with monopolistic power, and their ability to have their way with the government, got her thinking about the big American systems. "
25 " Fracking—to take one example—was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE. Yet fracking has collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to American energy independence. Solar and wind technologies are another example. The "
26 " fourth risk: the electrical grid. The river and its tributaries generate more than 40 percent of the hydroelectric power for the United States; were the dams to fail, the effects would be catastrophic. "
27 " the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t. Which brought us to the fifth risk. "
28 " The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense. "
29 " (“Resistance to understanding a threat grows with proximity,” writes Kate Brown.) "
30 " 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. "
31 " Psychologists have long known that people see patterns where none exist. "
32 " It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you. "
33 " It’s the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most. "
34 " 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. "
35 " fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. "
36 " If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview. "
37 " Fighting wildfires is the most visible thing the USDA does. It's the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most. "
38 " More of America’s problems than even DJ had imagined could be better understood and addressed with better access to the right information. The problem of excessive police force was another example. After a white policeman shot a defenseless black man in Ferguson, Missouri, the White House convened police chiefs from ten American cities, along with their data. The policing data was local and difficult to get ahold of—and that was DJ’s point. He wanted to show what might be possible if the government collected the information. “We asked the question: What causes excessive use of police force?” Combing the data from the ten cities, a team of researchers from several American universities found a pattern that would be hard to spot with the naked eye. Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation—a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which a child was involved—were more likely to use excessive force. Maybe the problem wasn’t as simple as a bad cop. Maybe it was the emotional state in which the cop had found himself. “Dispatch sent them right back out without time to decompress,” said DJ. “Give them a break in between and maybe they behave differently. "
39 " Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress. "
40 " The relationship between the people and their government troubled her. The government was the mission of an entire society: why was the society undermining it? “I’m routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government,” she said. “The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense. "