(September 27, 2018 at 8:19 am)Wololo Wrote: I don't know about you, but reading this piece on the transition leaves me cold.
I just finished reading The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. The article you linked was a section from the book.
In the book, the author wrote a series of stories about the experiences of a variety of interesting people working for the government, but the message was still clear. Americans vastly undervalue what their government agencies do for them on a daily basis, primarily because those agencies don't promote their many good works -- unlike businesses who advertise.
Because of this ignorance, politicians and especially Republicans have promoted the counter-factual message that the government wastes taxpayers' money. The hostility this generates is a big reason Trump was elected, and he took his election as a mandate to appoint people who are actively hostile to the agencies they oversee. Such people have a motivation to remain ignorant, which is why they neglected the transition of important information. It's also why they appoint under-qualified or even unqualified people who are merely loyal to the president and his aims.
And this is why Trump appointees may end up dropping the ball with the so-called fifth risk, which is project management for risk mitigation and R&D. They are simply too uninformed to understand the future economic and quality-of-life importance of such programs. The big casualties of this short-sightedness are science and especially climate change science.
The most important quote I read in the book is this one: "Here is where the Trump administration's willful ignorance plays a role. 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."
In this case, the worldview is pro-business and anti-government completely out of proportion to the real value of both.