Michael Lewis Makes Boring Stuff Interesting - WSJ - 0 views
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The idea, Mr. Lewis says from his family’s perch amid Craftsman houses and bungalows in the hills above Berkeley, Calif., is to examine “what’s happened to fairness” in an age when America’s arbiters are no longer trusted. The Walter Cronkites of the world are gone, and those assigned to make the tough calls are reviled, threatened and assumed (sometimes correctly) to be corrupt.
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“It’s a big problem for democracy if people don’t have a shared reality,” Mr. Lewis says. “It’s difficult to establish a referee in an increasingly unequal environment” like today’s U.S., “when there are powerful parties and not-so powerful ones. You have a different kind of problem than if you’re in Norway.”
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His calling card, echoed by untold critics and readers, is this: He makes boring stuff interesting. He collects disparate ingredients, whips them up with character and narrative, and distills human stories into engrossing big-picture explainers.
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podcasts were new for him. He teamed up with his friends, the writer Malcolm Gladwell and former Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, whose fledgling podcast company is called Pushkin Industries.
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When he was writing “The Big Short” (2010), Mr. Lewis says, he kept seeing failures of refereeing. “There was no referee at the interface between Wall Street and the consumers—consumer finance. I saw the birth of that, when Wall Street hit segments of society it had never touched, through subprime mortgages, for car loans, through asset-backed securities. There was no one saying, ‘That’s fair and that’s not.’”
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Mr. Lewis also has harsh words for the ratings firms that endorsed shady securities—sold by the people who were paying them—before the big-bank meltdown. “I’d have thought for sure they’d reform it somehow, change the incentives. It’s so obvious, and [former Sen.] Al Franken tried, but all this Wall Street money flowed into the process to prevent him from doing that, and it drove him crazy.”
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Mr. Lewis doesn’t blame Wall Street and deregulation for everything. He has also faulted home buyers for their role in the crash, for example. “To blame the people who lent the money for the real estate boom is like blaming the crack dealers for creating addicts,” he wrote in a 2008 article on the lure of home ownership.