Real life is not stranger than fiction, but, when Michael Lewis tells it, it is more exciting. Lewis is arguably the best in the world at finding underdogs and oddballs, and spinning their triumphs into smart entertainment. The data-driven baseball manager Billy Beane in Moneyball, the wacky contrarian investors in The Big Short — Lewis made them superstars, and their stories made him richer even than his brief stint as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers did. Most of his 18 books are bestsellers.
But do people really listen? When I meet Lewis in London’s Covent Garden over breakfast, he’s having scrambled eggs — and a few doubts. His most recent book, The Premonition, published last year, unpicked what really went wrong with the US’s response to coronavirus. It wasn’t Donald Trump (he was just a “comorbidity”). It was the dysfunctional federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which demanded a monopoly on testing then couldn’t produce a working test. It was also a failure to learn from history, namely the 1918 flu epidemic, which showed that places which embraced social distancing did better. Today those nettles remain firmly ungrasped.
“I’m really surprised,” says Lewis, who is genial even when in despair. “You look at the map of death rates across the United States, there are such dramatic differences from place to place . . . Why isn’t the mayor of Miami, or the governor of Florida, being asked about that? They’re not being punished at all. It’s like people think it’s in the hands of the gods.”