Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

Mei Ling's recommendation.

I completely agree with Jay's review. My group loved it, and has an even deeper appreciation for Federal employees who have uplifted citizens and kept our country running for the past 250 years. It's not perfectly oiled machine, but the folks they interview readily admit that. And they are looking for ways to improve all the time. The fact that they don't want to call attention to themselves, but instead look to their teams who work together for ALL Americans, really restored my faith in the goodness of people in general. I highly recommend that everyone read this book.

This book is a series of panegyrics. It was a step-by-step process of losing my patience. It came to a head with Kamau Bell's section. I like Kamau Bell, in fact I'm vaguely familiar with all the writers in the book, but there was an overwhelming sense of, Why am I reading this, and why is it so poorly organized? The book began as a series of articles for the Washington Post, which answered some of my questions. These are essays meant for general consumption - as in, its topics were dumbed down for a general public. I am the type of person who has an appreciation for the intelligence of all people of all classes. Even for newspaper articles, I found the material to be really condescending. Michael Lewis gushes about his super-genius mining researcher. Casey Cep praises to the moon a manager of graves. Dave Eggers tries to convince you with an intensity that can only be called insane the importance of launching things into space. Hilariously, Eggers' article defeats the purpose of the book, which is to convince the public the usefulness of government. The NASA scientists develop two completely different solutions for identifying planets, and they decide to not use one because it kinda sucks. And then Eggers says, No, it's actually really cool! I don't have anything against scientific innovation, and I understand innovation requires many missteps. You have to fail to say, "Oh, well we know that doesn't work now." I don't mind taxpayer money goes into these, because who knows, that research may become world-changing. But the writers of this book never entertain the opposing argument of, "Hey, maybe this is the reason why people complain about government spending all the time?" which debate would be, you know, interesting! This book is unbelievably shallow, though it has solidified certain functions of government that I hadn't thought of before. One of the better sections, Lanchester's essay on the CPI, frustrated me in his discussion on the Enlightenment. He cites the CPI as a product of the Enlightenment, which makes no sense to me. What he is really looking for is a conclusion to his essay, which would go something like this: "The CPI is a flawed number, however, it is used in the analyses of such and such and such..." It's telling not a few of the collaborators have their hand in fiction. It means their jobs aren't to simply paint portraits of their subjects - which many non-fiction writers do - it means that their jobs are to paint dramas out of their subjects, as if they're John Martin painting Lucifer's descent into Pandemonium. This is not the correct way to inspire intellectual debate and pointed discussion. Anyway, I can go on forever, but I really shouldn't. I'll return to Bell's essay. The essays are meant to "humanize" the government, which is evident by Bell writing about his goddaughter. By Bell's essay, this becomes abundantly clear. But instead of humanizing government, by focusing on one member of his family, he instead makes government look fake. But it's still a 5 for the strictly informational material in it. Edit: I should really let this book go but here's another example of a "WTF?" moment: in Lewis's essay "Free-Living Bureaucrat" he mentions a "Chinese company that had so graciously supplied the drug." Well, no: the likeliest explanation is that the company's profit-cost margin made selling the drug make sense. I know the American drug industry gets a bad rep but that just seems like the simplest explanation from a market perspective, particularly since it's a foreign firm. I really, really hate the lionization in this book, particularly when it doesn't even have an effect in that essay's narrative.

My Book Club really enjoyed this book. We have a better appreciation for those that have chosen to use their talent to make government work for everyone.