"It was like somebody turned on the lights."

September 3, 2024 5:38 AM

The Canary: Michael Lewis on Chris Mark of the Department of Labor (SLWaPo)
posted by box (14 comments total)

I am very angry at Lewis for that last book/podcast/boot-licking stunt about Sam Bankman-Freid, but this piece goes a long way to making up for that. It goes in depth on a very interesting guy...but now I want a whole series of these pieces on the other people that he names!

You can read a list of the nominees for the 2024 medals, and see information abbot the 2023 and 2022 winners, at https://servicetoamericamedals.org.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:10 AM on September 3 [4 favorites]

Putting aside Michael Lewis's assorted other shenanigans, if you like this kind of thing his 2018 book The Fifth Risk is very much in this vein and a lot of it is a love letter to some of the people who keep our government going and our country functioning. It's my favorite thing that he has written.
posted by fancypants at 6:39 AM on September 3 [13 favorites]

I met Max Stier shortly after Partnership for Public Service launched, and I remember being struck by two things: (1) He is going to face a massive challenge to do the things he wants to do. (2) He struck me as someone who would get them done anyway.

The potential partnership between PSP and my organization never came to be, and it's been 20+ years since I had any interaction with him, but I've seen his name pop up over the years in various different places, and it's been really enjoyable to watch his success. It's also wonderful to see the growing recognition of public servants and what they accomplish.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 6:49 AM on September 3 [1 favorite]

I try to read everything Michael Lewis writes and most of it is worth it. As an aside, what happened with SBF was in part an accident of circumstance, it was like writing the biography of a hand grenade and publishing it on the day before the pin got pulled. If he had finished six months earlier it would have been a poster child for getting fooled, or publishing two years later and we might have had a definitive work on the decline and fall. The decision to publish when he did got us ugly shrapnel and made ML look particularly foolish (plus ML doubled down on it and that just made him look more foolish).

On topic, this is an excellent article and I second stanning for The Fifth Risk, which is a hell of a book and in equal parts uplifting and terrifying (as it was published when DJT was cavalierly dismantling (at best) or simply inattentive to (at worst) the people and civil service institutions that actually run the (political part) of the country).
posted by chavenet at 7:33 AM on September 3 [4 favorites]

thanks for this. i especially appreciated learning details about eradication of polio [partnership for public service]

the extended discussion of mines brought Henri Poincaré's early work to mind [mathshistory]
posted by HearHere at 8:21 AM on September 3 [1 favorite]

Lewis is great at writing about subjects that evade general notice. That being said, he is not infallible (see:Sam Bankman-Fried and Michael Oher). On balance, though, I’d say he’s one of the good ones.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 8:28 AM on September 3 [2 favorites]

Via Google Scholar, a list of Chris Mark's papers.
posted by needled at 8:45 AM on September 3 [1 favorite]

I haven’t gotten through the wapo article yet, but I saw thatthis is going to be a series, based on expanding the type of government figures Featured in The Fifth Risk

I too was disappointed with his coverage of SBF, but we certainly need more coverage of how people work to make government work.
posted by CostcoCultist at 9:25 AM on September 3 [2 favorites]

Lewis is a great writer who knows how to tell a clear and compelling story. The problem is that real life isn't necessarily quite as clear as the story. For example, he writes: "an economic historian ... wanted to argue that roof bolts had taken 20 years to reduce fatality rates because it had taken 20 years for the coal mining industry to learn to use them. All by itself, the market had solved this worker safety problem!" But the abstract of the article (which he does not cite or link), includes the exact argument that Lewis says he misses: "This lag reflected the need for organizational learning, while companies also traded safety for productivity [emphasis added]." Lewis has to present it as "idiot says A vs hero says B," when, as is typical in these types of arguments, the debate is over whether A or B was more important.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 9:33 AM on September 3 [8 favorites]

Really compelling piece, although I felt like it told a story of a lone genius, instead of a story of the importance and potential of government regulation.

I also sort of bristled at the setup, about how hard it is to find government workers to celebrate. Part of that is structural reasons - most people work on teams, not on individual initiatives: there's not a ton of stuff that we do for which people can take individual credit.

The reputation of government work as not being innovative really has to do with a structural issue, by which the people who make the laws are so distanced from the people who implement them that the latter are working under absurd requirements that the former don't consider or value. Jennifer Pahlka writes about this, focusing on technology but with depth and breadth that covers a lot of government work. Worth a read.
posted by entropone at 12:28 PM on September 3 [8 favorites]

I was not going to read this because Bankman-Fried nonsense but Lewis is a really good writer, and this is well worth reading. Amazing case study of dogged, determined, meticulous research and very creative thinking. I'm glad he's winning a Sammie!
posted by bluesky43 at 1:45 PM on September 3 [2 favorites]

Lewis is extremely poor at recognizing when someone is mobilizing his priors against his reporting skills, see Michael Oher's adoptive (oh-wait-not-really) family.

And, yeah, you don't get so many "lone wolf heroes" in a democracy's civil service because almost by definition they have to work collaboratively and in consultation with many stakeholders. Bureaucracies can be incredibly frustrating to deal with, but, given their immense power, you actually do want some deliberation and due process.
posted by praemunire at 6:36 PM on September 3 [3 favorites]

Every long-running band puts out a bad album or two. FIAMO
posted by rhizome at 10:21 PM on September 3

I agree that the last year has been rough to be a Michael Lewis fan. He's such a delightful writer, and on a personal level I'm very susceptible to haut bourgeois Southerners who are not explicitly terrible and implicitly crazy. Even the SBF thing feels like a charming misstep! (It is as if Alex Holmes, the documentarian who planned to make a movie about Lance Armstrong's drive and resilience only to be derailed as the doping scandal broke and accordingly created a movie about Armstrong's amoral selfishness, had instead doubled down on Armstrong being a hero. It's so stupid that it's almost endearing.) But the Michael Oher story is just so grim and depressing. Lewis would rightly come off badly no matter what for not bothering to speak to Oher at all before ostensibly telling his story, but every time he comments on Michael Oher's rejection of the Blind Side narrative, Lewis comes off as callous and defensive. I would feel better about it if he would just shut the fuck up! I'm hoping some publicist has advised him accordingly for this round of press.

If this is more Fifth Risk stuff, it might be worth a read, for water cooler talk if nothing else. Fifth Risk was a delightful source of "hey did you know about" stories; I spent six months bringing up Art Allen in every quiet social moment. And it might be good from a positive propaganda sense, well -- ever since Rick Perry gibberingly attempted to remember which government departments he wanted to eliminate, I've thought we could do with more discussion of how the American government can be good and useful to its citizenry.
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:31 AM on September 6