I love long form nonfiction, and Michael Lewis is one of the best. A writer and podcaster, his narrative-driven approach to illustrate or explain or describe a complicated issue/event helps his audience understand it in a way that’s only possible through story. And stories come to life through their characters. So when he wants to explain something, he finds a person doing it, and then by telling their story, we come to know the larger issue in a more intimate, hands on way.

When he wrote about the pandemic in his book The Premonition, he did so through public health officer Charity Dean and other cutting edge scientists and epidemiologists. When he wrote about the 2008 housing crisis in The Big Short, he featured a few experts who had predicted the demise well in advance. 

In this latest book, Who is Government, he is both writer and editor as he invites various nonfiction writers like Geraldine Brooks and Dave Eggers to join him to feature “untold stories of public service.” Each of the 8 essays focuses on a person doing critical, cutting edge, excellent work for the government–none of it noticed or appreciated by the general public. 

The first essay features Christopher Mark at the Dep of Labor, a man who has dedicated his entire career to figuring out how to keep coal mine roofs from collapsing. Another essay features a small group of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who will discover which exoplanets support life. A third essay features neither a person nor a team, but rather numbers: how and why the Consumer Price Index at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with its unending data and graphs, is so central to understanding the economy. 

As a group, government employees are far too often denigrated as “unelected bureaucrats” and entire departments as “wasteful.” But when you tell a story through the people, you uncover a much different story, a story of really smart, hardworking unsung heroes that do stuff to make our lives better. 

Yes, these are anecdotal stories well told, and surely they do not represent every government employee or department, but surely they do represent an awful lot of civil servants who have dedicated their lives to the betterment of America. Through these feature stories, Lewis unearths, highlights, and celebrates good work. Why not strive to replicate more of this instead of of burning it all down. 

Real stories are more powerful than the waste, fraud, and abuse narrative, but sadly, the latter sells and the former takes time to read.