Andrew Yang and the War on Normal People
For those of you who don’t know who Andrew Yang is quite yet, he’s a promising political outsider running for President under the 2020 Democratic Party ticket. I recently picked up Andrew Yang’s new book, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future and wanted to share some words about the book and his platform.
Yang is a Silicon Valley tech guru turned venture capitalist who now runs his very own non-profit called Venture for America. A job skills program designed to prepare America’s next generation of entrepreneurs with the tech skills of tomorrow.
Yang is also one of the first individuals to declare a run for Presidency under the Democratic. Party ticket in 2020. As a Silicon Valley guy, who’s well aware of a future dominated by complex A.I.’s and robots, Yang is openly proposing the use of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to a future where “normal people” become ever more devalued in the marketplace. Yang theorizes, and I would concur, that job retraining alone will not be enough to fill in the future gaps in unemployment that most lower, working and middle-class Americans face in the future.
More so, Yang infers that if the market mechanisms of cost reduction and efficiency are to continue, eventually companies like Uber or Amazon will no longer have any human facing employees. This proposition, which appears to be the only logical conclusion at hand, will eventually result in tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans without jobs, and in a society based primarily on meritocracy, the outlook appears bleak. Eventually, the nation will be split into those who own the robotic forms of production and everyone else.
At the heart of the UBI proposal is a concept which Andrew Yang calls “Human Capitalism or Human-Centered Capitalism.” Here I draw some contention. Yang’s term already has a clearly defined term within political science called Social Democracy. Part of me thinks Yang is attempting to distance himself away from any socialist leaning ideas considering he’s running with zero name recognition. If that is true, he’s either being disingenuous, which American politics obviously needs no more of, or he’s running for president and doesn’t understand a basic political science term. Who knows????
That being said, Social Democracy and Yang’s Human Capitalism, both set out to establish a market-based system whose sole purpose is to improve upon society and the collective human experience and not curtail legislation to the will of consolidated capital forces. Take for example, if society would function better with socialized healthcare, so be it. If society were to function better with seat belts, so be it. Or if society were to function with better regulations around the environmental impact of production, so be it.
Yang’s proposal seeks to reevaluate the incentive structures within society. By moving away from actions valued on fiat currency and into one based upon “social credit.” The donation of time and effort within a community would create digital coinage which could be traded for assistance or goods in the future. Cleaning graffiti, volunteering, sharing property are all things that could help your neighbors, but as things currently stand, there exists *no* accountable incentive structure outside of social brownie points. This system of exchange mixes barter with technologies that induce collectivization and shared information. Time Transfer Credits or Social Credits could create a secondary economy which exists alongside currently existing currencies and could theoretically replace existing currencies once paid labor becomes a rarity.
What I find most refreshing about Yang in comparison to other politicians is his willingness to look outside the box and towards the future. The society we live in today is radically changing. Artificial intelligence holds the potential to replace the common man in most fields of labor. Robot surgeons already exist, fast food restaurants are replacing workers with automated lines and digital ordering kiosks, while companies like Tesla are creating driverless cars which pose to end the need for car ownership entirely. I must say, I’m excited to see how effective Yang’s message will be over the next couple of years and whether or not he’ll be able to participate in the broken debate and campaign finance system.
