The recent one-two punch delivered to Michael Lewis’s reputation by his inexcusable remarks about Michael Oher—“What we’re watching is a change of behavior,” he told The Guardian. “This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head: they run into problems with violence and aggression.”—and his apparently insufficiently critical appraisal of epically self-involved crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has caused some modest shockwaves in the world of those who take longform journalism seriously. As David Roth put it, “I don’t want to have to go back and reconsider this guy’s whole shit.”
It looks like there are two complaints here—I’m going to argue they are intertwined to the point of being the same. The nasty implication that Oher has CTE or got manipulated into suing seems to take Lewis’s “nuanced” efforts to peel back the wretched racism that permeates college football exploitation and show that even his own analysis was caught up in the system. Watching a journalist turn on a lionized subject, especially when that turn is shot through with racist tropes about black male violence, is gross. As for SBF, the public pleading on behalf of his good-hearted youthful indiscretion even after his criminality was revealed seems like a failure of craft. For those who loved Lewis’s prior works, or many of them, it’s not simply the missed opportunity, it’s the squander. You had it, bro. You totally fucking had it. What is the point of access journalism if you’re going to whiff it like that?
At the top I should say that whiffing happens. I don’t think Lewis’s The New New Thing is all that, and it offers a sort of foretaste of the SBF mess. But it isn’t just Lewis. I tried to make the case at some length for Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, and it still freaks me out. There is probably no filmmaker I rooted harder for than Julia Reichert, relentless documenter of my hometown’s long path through deindustrialization. The local socialist who made a difference because she was a local socialist. But even she was not immune—for American Factory she and Steven Bognar had better access than anyone would ever dream of: presence in board meetings where they discuss in direct terms the anti-union efforts; people who present themselves as rounded characters going through changes on screen, actual villains discussing their schemes, and a story that offered crystal clear connections between Dayton and global capitalism. Yet American Factory ends by veering away from its logical conclusions about worker power to maunder about automation. I attribute that whiff to the Obamas’ involvement, but I realize that might be special pleading on my part.
So: Lewis turns on Oher and defends his “conservators” the Tuohys while he can’t bring himself to turn on SBF. The joint reading seems pretty simple: Michael Lewis has an easier time empathizing with well-heeled white folks than younger Black men who came into money playing ball. I think that conjuncture is there, but that isn’t enough. Because the thing we are trying to explain is not what is up with Michael Lewis the guy with looming implicit racial bias but what is up with Michael Lewis the guy who has also been our go-to explainer for the interactions of finance capitalism and professional life.
I have not yet read Going Infinite. (I will!) I have obviously read Lewis’s statement about Oher. But I did write about Michael Lewis in Hollywood Math and Aftermath. On the one hand, I still like those pages and still think they can be useful—I’ll explain why below. On the other hand, those pages suffer from exactly the problem that all my own writing suffers from: an assumption that people will just read it and take all sorts of things from it, whatever they need, it’s got plenty of riffs to go around. But that is not how anyone reads academic work anymore, really. And it isn’t clear that anyone would or could ever find these pages if, say, they were to ask themselves the question that follows Roth’s question—“Did he secretly suck the entire time?”—which is “Was I a chump?”
Here's the long passage where I try to work through Lewis’s approach. At this point in the chapter, I’m doing this to get to a political reading of Brad Pitt’s stardom and then to the (to me) stunning revelation that Columbia called its motion picture financial modeling project “The Moneyball Initiative.” But I stand by the reading of Lewis on its own. The swirl of race and finance was always there, and it always depended on remaining a reading. If the two got too close, Lewis would back off:
In the work of Michael Lewis—in both the sports books Moneyball and The Blind Side, and in his histories of high finance such as Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, Flash Boys, and his account of Long-Term Capital Management—the interplay of arbitrage and exploitation looks like the oscillation between an idea and a person. The arbitrageurs are forever attempting to isolate themselves from the consequences of their actions by reducing what they do to “strategy,” but because the central phenomenon of their strategy is the trade, the equation of one thing with another, when their trades become a traffic in people, the brutal legacies of actual human traffic rise up through the rhetoric. This helps explain some of the difficult reckonings with race in Lewis, and some of his interest in situations of self-exploitation, where the idea, and not the power relation, can take center stage.
So when John Meriwether pioneers bond arbitrage at Salomon Brothers, Lewis describes him as setting up “a sort of underground railroad that ran from the finest graduate finance and math programs directly onto the Salomon trading floor.” These intellectuals replace mere traders like Lewis, who now “belonged to a new semi-informed breed who could ‘pass’ as experts on the new financial complexity without possessing true understanding.” Lewis, not happy “passing,” remains jealous of his hyperwealthy former colleagues until they are wiped out. The 1998 disaster spawned by Meriwether’s Long-Term Capital Management came the closest to breaking the contemporary financial system before the 2008 crash. In addition to everything else it did, it liberated Lewis from his aspirations to untold wealth. “I demanded no further reparations. I was once again satisfied to be paid by the word.” Underground railroads, new breeds, folks who are passing and demanding reparations—the racial configuration remains, just barely, subtextual.
Once the traders are no longer trading themselves, though, exploitation comes roaring back. In Moneyball, the complex salary system imposed by the league underpays high-value rookies. Initially this allows the A’s to compete by drafting well. Lewis immediately, and without hesitation, links the moment of free agency to the rights of individuals under capitalism: “Not until . . . he had been in the big leagues for six years, would Barry Zito, like any other citizen of the republic, be allowed to auction his services to the highest bidder. At which point, of course, the Oakland A’s would no longer be able to afford Barry Zito. That’s why it was important to find Barry Zito here, in the draft room, and obtain him for the period of his career when he could be paid the baseball equivalent of slave’s wages.”
It is no accident that the slave’s wages are paid to a white man and that the utopian possibility is being able to auction yourself (sorry, your services) to the highest bidder. But at the core of Lewis’s two-track analysis of sports and finance is this dance around exploitation. A few pages later, I am writing more about Moneyball the movie and the happy ending that was grafted onto it late in production. The movie is of course not the book, but the movie is deeply Lewisian.
The movie’s happy ending will not be the A’s winning the World Series—they did not. Nor will it be Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane becoming the highest paid general manager in baseball—he rejected the Red Sox’ offer. The happy ending, for Beane, will be winning enough games that he can keep his job and stay in Oakland near his daughter. At the same time, the movie’s happy ending will decidedly not be the players discovering that they are undervalued and successfully demanding their rightful compensation. Baseball players, and subsequently professional athletes in most other major sports, have since used “statistics the way we read them” to do just that. But no one in Moneyball has any interest in wising up the players lest the arbitrage possibility disappear, leaving the A’s back in the cellar. (They would be there in 2015.) Stripped of Pitt’s stardom, and this relationship looks like exploitation, and in Moneyball, we are supposed to root for it.
The relationship between Beane and pitcher Chad Bradford has all the makings of a bad conscience. “You knew I was worth $3 million and you thought you could get away with paying me $237,000,” Bradford might say. Instead, he thanks Beane for the opportunity to play and says he’ll pray for him and his family. In order to allay—or at least defer—the eruption of a demand for something like justice, the movie turns to its real, chiasmic project: convincing the numberjockey to understand the human costs of his reduction of people to numbers and convincing the subjects of that reduction to willingly enlist themselves in the project.
When Lewis lashed out at Michael Oher’s competence and humanity, and when (if) he whiffed in his portrait of SBF, those are the two sides of the chiasmic exchange, disentangled. Lewis finds himself unable to back off and return to a world of reading, of analyzing at some distance. Instead of Moneyball’s happy ending, we get the double bummer of Lewis playing defense for both halves of his project, a liberal project that, when pushed to the wall, turns vicious and po’ faced. As liberalism will.
Lewis held these two tracks in suspension longer than maybe anyone else could—that is a mark of his skill as a writer and his knack for choosing projects. If he has been our go-to explainer for the interactions of finance capitalism and professional life, what we are seeing right now is what happens when the professional life at stake is not that of literary character Michael Lewis the junior trader but Michael Lewis the writer. What matters about that is less what it tells us about Lewis than what it tells us about how much work, how much art, capitalism demands to keep us on the hook.