The bio on Andrew Yang’s book says he has “been the CEO, co-founder or executive of a number of technology and education companies.” He leveraged success to train “the next generation of entrepreneurs” through his non-profit, Venture for America. In The War on Normal People: The Truth about America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income is our Future Yang says success places him “in the room with winners.” This legitimizes his concern for structural unfairness in the marketplace for “normal people.”
Yang isn’t normal. At a time when the brightest minds seem wholly occupied with optimizing getting & spending as the rest of us drift into survival mode, Andrew Yang extrapolates from business opportunities his peers are pursuing and asks what it will mean for the common good. To avoid a bleak future, he proffers some national policy.
The book is econ 101: “companies are paid to perform certain tasks, not employ lots of people.” Yang, as a businessman, reminds us that whether making a profit coincides with any human benefit is inconsequential. “War” isn’t explained. Nor is “normal.” One suspects that some of his coastal peers are beginning to be concerned about revolution.
Yang does quote Bismarck, “if revolution there is to be, let us rather undertake it, not undergo it.”
Yang intends to problem-solving, not rhetoric. He may avoid the common poo-pooing of economic inequality by seeing it for what it historically portends. While the American economy that Yang and his peers inhabit “is flourishing. Little effort is being made to distribute the gains from automation and reverse the decline in opportunities. To do so,” says Yang in the introduction, “would require an active, stable, invigorated, unified federal government willing to make large bets.” He recommends a “Human-Centered Capitalism” which may encompass both of the generational challenges we face today—income inequality and climate change.
The concept of Universal Basic Income which he promotes as a response makes a certain amount of sense, perhaps more than our current framework of so many government programs which take thousands of government workers to confirm recipient qualifications and administer. Yang is a budding socio-economic philosopher and innovator at a time we sorely need it.
No, I will not be voting for Mr. Yang for president. His assessment is sound. His policy needs refinement. Will his big-picture ideas penetrate the campaign din, especially for younger voters or some Trump voters? Andrew Yang is refreshingly sincere and honest.
I recommend Yang’s book because what he sees is impending, and more disruptive than color TV, AOL or smartphones. His angle may open some to understanding structural inequality, to the limitations of relying on the market, which has displaced religion for many conservatives, and place renewed optimism in government coming from someone who is not a career liberal politician. Both parties have given up arguing that the federal government is the primary tool for boldly addressing common problems; conservatives out of cynicism and money, liberals out of fear and self-loathing. Yang apparently has neither.
The War on Normal People foresees that those who create technology and develop business opportunities will reap vast financial rewards by increasing productivity while reducing the need for human workers. He starts with “How we got Here” noting The Great Displacement didn’t happen overnight. The next five chapters are the most powerful in the book. Reading them rapidly as I did, is to begin to feel the heat on the frog in the proverbial frying pan that is our situation today. Evening news fails to show how most of us on the planet are increasingly separated from the opportunities to access the basic wealth we thought could sustain. Such assessment as simple-minded as mine could be replaced by A.I. Thank goodness it isn’t my day job.
Yang argues that applications of Artificial Intelligence will be exponentially more disruptive than the incremental productivity improvement of our post-industrial age. A.I will transform the nature of work and the workplace in ways we are just beginning to glimpse. My next surgery will not be performed by a robot, but that is coming soon. The next few chapters of The War… as he describes the effects of this on middle America are not so strong. Yang probably doesn’t know “normal people.” Not all our human failings derive from economic inequality—check out the 10 Commandments.
Yang’s best thinking bends toward the philosophical. Quoting Oscar Wilde, “work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do,” Yang notes that this “may describe the vast majority of us. The challenge we must overcome is that humans need work more than work needs us.”
Utopias, including communes and frozen dinner manufacturers, proffered this future of leisure. Yang sees work for what it is; something that fulfills, socializes and stabilizes human beings while providing a basic income. Basic work providing a basic income. That is retail. That is manual labor. That is trust in your … plumber or doctor. What about when the human purpose of driving a car or truck becomes as superfluous as a plane being “flown” by a pilot, or an elevator being operated by an attendant? Yeah, it is still kind of sci-fi, but so was overseas travel before Pan-Am in 1958.
As it hits the marketplace, A.I. technology being developed today will make obsolete much of what we now consider skilled labor. Start with truck drivers which are the top employer in more than 1/3 of the 50 states who will be replaced by self-driving technology soon. I look forward to being able to text and drive. Pee in a cup without the distractions of the road. Humans are fickle. They have to sleep and eat. Much of the failure in the transportation infrastructure is a result of human failings which could be corrected. Yang explains that the same is true for surgeons who spend years training themselves to perform like machines which they ultimately are not.
Yang is no socialist.
Yang reminds us that government is designed to be adaptive to meet the needs of citizens. When did this become a radical idea?
It may be that like Huxley, Orwell and other future-shock-jocks, Yang is too many years ahead of us to prompt our action. Others are beginning to take note of the trend, a recent Los Angeles Times article by Ramesh Srinivasan on the subject Is Tech Stratifying and Automating Our Workforce beyond Repair? Cites a study from Oxford University that estimates “47% of jobs in developed nations will vanish in the next 25 years,” punctuated with “as a nation, we are completely unprepared for the upheaval this will create.”
Some of us may be forgiven for feeling this is a deja vous topic. My first job 40 years ago, now, was as a paperboy delivering The Columbian, a local paper in Vancouver, Washington. I delivered papers by bicycle and then went around “collecting” $4.50/month in checks and dollars for my route manager. The pace of change is accelerating. The Internet turned 50 this week, but it is only in the last 10 years uses of the internet has just about eliminated that entire newspaper/media world, from reporting, delivering the news to paying for it. Markets shift. Not much steel is produced in the U.S. today though it is just a hundred years after the U.S. dominated that market. The same could be said of auto manufacturing, textiles, furniture or clothing. Manufacturing gravitates to cheap labor. These sectors evolved away. Yet most of us get by. Yang believes this next wave of change is fundamentally different. Displacement will be widespread, and we are wholly unprepared.
Don’t read The War on Normal People because Yang is running for president, read it because we all need to be preparing to help our society make quantum leaps to avoid a dystopian future.
