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As the next Democratic presidential field takes shape, a young entrepreneur with big ideas might turn out to be one of the most intriguing candidates. If Donald Trump has shown that anything is now possible in American politics, Andrew Yang will be testing that thesis in 2020.
Like the incumbent president, Yang runs for the White House never having held elected office—but the comparisons end there. Yang not only shuns Trump’s confrontational tone and temperament, he also has little use for traditional labels such as “conservative” and “liberal.” The country may seem locked in endless division, but the 43-year-old graduate of Brown (economics) and Columbia (law) approaches politics and policymaking from a big-picture standpoint that transcends the common red-blue rancor.
Average Americans, Yang explains, are justifiably anxious about the economy and their place in the changing world. Automation, artificial intelligence, and other technological advances have already begun displacing huge segments of the workforce, and it’s only getting exponentially worse in the years ahead. This calls not for minor adjustments in policy, he says, but new ways of thinking about the economy and society as a whole.
Yang’s agenda is egalitarian, seeing a need to ensure that minimum levels of security and prosperity are enjoyed by all, not just the lucky few who reap the rewards of connections with Wall Street and Silicon Valley. His egalitarianism, however, could be described as pragmatic to the core. A problem solver not an ideologue, Yang is an unapologetic capitalist with little use for doctrinaire socialism, but he sees egalitarian policy as a practical response to the epic challenges presented by evolving technologies that are transforming society. He’s critical of “institutional capitalism and corporatism” and urges a “human capitalism,” noting that “our current emphasis on corporate profits isn’t working for the vast majority of Americans.”
With a campaign slogan of “Humanity First,” Yang puts forth notions that some powerful interests would consider provocative: that “humans are more important than money,” that society should utilize its expanding knowledge to move in a policy direction that allows the general population to prosper without exploitation and unnecessary toil. A centerpiece of his campaign is his advocacy for a universal basic income (UBI) which would provide all adult citizens with an income of $1000 monthly.
Yang has worked in healthcare, education, and has started up several companies. Since 2011 he has run Venture for America, a non-profit that mobilizes young entrepreneurs to create jobs. In 2012 he was named a Champion of Change by President Obama. He has also been honored by the White House as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons. The following interview has been edited for context and clarity.
DN: “Let’s Put Humanity First” is one of the first things that a visitor to your campaign web site sees. What message are you trying to convey with a slogan like that?
AY: We were trying to contrast a belief in humanity first with the way our society right now emphasizes markets and capital. Where if you hear the statement humanity first it seems radical initially, but then you reflect for a moment and say, well, what else should we be putting first? (Laughs) It just goes to show how far society has internalized the market logic of capital efficiency. What’s interesting is that initially the opposite of humanity might have been construed as either money or robots, which are very related, but we’re coming to realize that the opposite of humanity is also bureaucracies that are dehumanizing us in various ways.
DN: In your book, The War on Normal People, and in your other communications, you seem to avoid labels such as conservative and liberal. Is that a conscious decision on your part?
AY: I think at this point we need to get past some of these tired labels from decades ago. If you look at something like universal basic income, some of its foremost champions were Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, economists who are ordinarily thought of as in the conservative and libertarian camps. And there’s one state that currently has a basic income and that’s Alaska, a deep red state. A friend of mine says that basic income is not left or right, it’s forward. And I do think that trying to get beyond the fights in our political system, which are quite often leftovers from the sixties and seventies, would be more productive. So I believe what I believe, and my policies are laid out, and I’ll let someone else determine where they think that I fall on the spectrum.
DN: A lot of the labels that get thrown around nowadays are very inaccurate anyway. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, but commentators have pointed out that he’s really more of a New Deal Democrat. He’s not advocating for any public takeover of the means of production or anything like that. A lot of these labels seem almost trendy, carelessly thrown about.
AY: Yes, I agree. People don’t understand what socialism really means. The primary definition of socialism is that the government takes over the means of production, which would mean that the U.S. government would take over Google. . . If someone’s not advocating for that, then they’re probably not a socialist by the traditional definition.
DN: One of the first topics you bring up in your book is the “Great Displacement.” You refer to it as a “massive historical shift.” For people who are unfamiliar with your campaign and your book, could you describe what you mean by that?
AY: Sure. We are in the process of displacing many American workers in the biggest labor categories. If you look at the five biggest labor groups in the country, they are administrative and clerical workers, sales and retail workers, foodservice and food prep, truck drivers and transportation, and manufacturing. All of those job categories are getting automated very quickly. You can see it most starkly with manufacturing workers, who went from 19 million to 12 million between 2000 and 2015. The impact of that displacement has been catastrophic for many of those communities, which you can see in spiking suicide rates and drug overdoses, to a point now where life expectancy is declining. Seven Americans die of drug overdoses every hour. So, the Great Displacement is something that, for whatever reason, our leaders are unable to acknowledge.
DN: It’s true that we don’t hear leaders talking openly about this major shift, about the fact that humanity is reaching a point where, even for the general masses, a lifetime of labor might be no longer necessary. Do you have any theories as to why politicians avoid discussing this big-picture reality?
AY: A lot of it is that we have so deeply internalized market logic of human utility, which is that we all are inputs into a larger economic system. It’s hard for a politician to acknowledge that that model is breaking down, because it’s so core to American thought today. And it’s also difficult to acknowledge because the solutions are quite expansive and expensive, and politicians don’t want to come across as defeatists who are urging large expenditures. But it is a reality. The other issue is that politicians do not understand technology or the economy very well, unfortunately, and you can see that in many recent developments.
So I’m running for president in a very reality-based campaign, and it’s unfortunate that that’s so novel in this era. But I agree with you that it’s somewhat stunning that our political leadership is unable to acknowledge the elephant in the room. The reason why Donald Trump is our president today, in my view, is that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are the swing states he needed to win. And if you look at the voting data by district, there is a direct correlation between the adoption of industrial robots and the movement towards Trump in those districts. This is the elephant in the room, and our political leadership is unable to acknowledge it because they’re too deeply institutionalized and steeped in a language that demands that humans function as economic inputs first and foremost.
DN: What’s really ironic about it is that one could look at this as not necessarily a bad thing, as an opportunity. After all, a lifetime of toil is not necessarily humanity’s highest aspiration, is it? A lifetime of less work and more time for creative pursuits, family, and things like that is actually a good thing, right? Doesn’t your platform try to offer that?
AY: It does, but we need to build very robust institutions in that direction, because according to the data, when men in particular become idle and unemployed, they do not become happy painters, playing with their children in healthy ways. Instead they tend to become degenerates who engage in increasingly self-destructive and anti-social behavior. That’s just what the data says. And even now, a majority of the time that young men used to spend working, for those who are displaced, they’re spending playing video games. So that is a pattern we have to change. And so, unfortunately, it’s not an immediate progression to some happier, post-labor existence. It tends to take the form of a lot of men getting drunk and playing video games.
DN: It’s going to take some sort of cultural shift as well, it seems. Not that we can realistically expect everyone to embark on lives of artistic endeavors and things like that, but society does have to start thinking about how to create the cultural apparatus to engage this unemployed population.
AY: Yes, and one of my proposals as president is to initiate a new digital social currency that can be used to invigorate this new culture that would help provide structure and reinforcement to behaviors like caring for the elderly, nurturing children, volunteering in the community, improving the infrastructure, assisting people in getting off drugs, many of the things that we need in higher levels that the monetary market right now values at zero or close to zero. We need to find a way to value these things more appropriately, and that’s one of my key proposals. And this would include arts and creativity and environmental sustainability, where right now hoping that legions of displaced truck drivers are going to go home and find inner peace is somewhat naïve. So, if you want that to happen you’d have to invest significant resources and that’s exactly what we must do. If you look at the numbers, and I know you’re familiar with this David, but our life expectancy is declining and there’s a mental health crisis. There’s a real erosion of social capital in every direction. So, when someone talks about building a new culture, what that says to me is that we need to invest real resources, and the best way to do that, in my view, is through a new digital social currency.
DN: The author Yuval Noah Harari speaks about this unemployed demographic as “useless.” It’s kind of a blatant term, not very kind, but in some ways it’s accurate. What you’re saying, however, is that unemployed people aren’t necessarily useless, but there is a need to channel them and somehow make them useful even though they’re perhaps not earning the paycheck they once earned.
AY: Well, this is the big leap we have to make, which is that when you say someone’s useless, as viewed by the marketplace, it’s because you’re accepting the marketplace’s valuation on his or her time. Like right now a truck driver’s time is worth $45,000 a year. And then tomorrow when the truck can drive itself we’re going to say now your time is valued at much, much less. So it’s not that the human has changed—their work ethic hasn’t changed, their character hasn’t changed. It’s just that now technology has advanced to the point to where the truck can drive itself. And it’s not just going to be truck drivers, it’s going to be radiologists and accountants and many attorneys. So it doesn’t correspond to any of the mythology that we’ve been told about character or work ethic or even education, because some of the affected workers are going to be highly educated. So we have to form a new definition of usefulness that gets beyond the values that the market is placing upon us, because the market is going to turn on more and more of us, and if we listen to it for too long we are going to end up shrinking inward and devouring ourselves.
DN: One of the approaches you seem to take is the idea of universal benefits, as opposed to trying to patch up the holes in a leaking boat by creating programs for this, programs for that. Do you see a big difference between having welfare programs, unemployment programs, food stamp programs—all these programs that help particular qualified segments of society—and programs such as universal health care and universal basic income that apply to everyone?
AY: Yes, I think there is a big difference. Right now we have over 80 welfare programs. Unfortunately, there’s a massive bureaucracy and there’s a sense of debilitation that accompanies enrolling and trying to receive benefits. And then you have to be monitored and report. If you start doing well then you no longer qualify.
DN: It also encourages conflict, where you’ve got people who are outside the benefits resenting those who are inside. The two may even be from very similar socio-economic backgrounds, but because of one not getting the benefits and the other getting the benefits you’ve got tremendous resentment. And from there it’s very easy to start demonizing various demographic groups.
AY: Yeah, we’re at a point now where 59 percent of Americans can’t pay an unexpected $500 bill, and a majority of Americans are laboring under a constant mindset of scarcity, or they are working from week to week or paycheck to paycheck with an uncertain future, and it’s causing much of the social and political dysfunction in our country. So this is no longer a kind of niche need. We’re reaching a point now where an overall solution would be much more effective. And as you just pointed out, we need to remove the stigma that’s associated with many of these programs. That’s one reason why I called universal basic income the “freedom dividend,” because we are all stakeholders in the richest, most advanced society in the history of the world, and we can easily afford $1000 per month, per adult citizen.
DN: It’s often been the vision of futurists to see society advance to the point where technology enables people to live without a life of toil, but it highlights the problem that we talked about a few minutes ago, that maybe toil can be a good thing if you’re going to gravitate to drugs and alcoholism and other problems without it. Nevertheless, with technology advancing, it seems there has to be a long-term goal of getting past that as well, of having a society where people can live without having to trade in their hours on a massive level just to exist.
AY: Yes, that’s one reason why government-guaranteed jobs problems can be easily misguided. Because it would lead to a world where people are showing up to make more jobs just to be able to feed themselves and survive. You’d wind up with an army of essentially servants of the state who are completely beholden to the state for basic needs, depending upon them showing up from nine to five to some job that may or may not be adding any value. One of the things I concluded in researching my book is that the future is now on both sides. Where our economy is now so massive, it’s up to $19 trillion, up $4 trillion in the last ten years alone, where we can afford much bigger solutions. And on the flip side our technology is advancing to a point where it is already displacing millions of American workers.
McKinsey came out with a report saying that 30 percent of American workers will be subject to automation by 2030. Bain came out with a similar report saying 20 to 25 percent of American workers by 2030 and that the rate of labor absorption would have to be four times that of the industrial revolution, which itself included massive problems and riots. . . So, when someone says that sometime in the distant future we’re going to need something like universal basic income, I would argue that we are there right now. . . If you go early on this kind of thing, then you get more time to adapt and calibrate. . . whereas if you wait too long it could become catastrophic because it is very difficult to restore functionality and reintegrate society after it has been lost.
DN: It seems that it will be necessary to reshape some values that are quite prevalent in American society—that not working is shameful, that work is just naturally honorable even if you’re being exploited and given a job that nobody would really want. There’s a grain of truth to those values as well—work can be honorable, so there is that side of it—but it seems that to achieve a society that actually appreciates the programs that you’re suggesting, there’s going to be need to rethink some of those values at some level.
AY: Well, the key is how you define work. I’m married, I have two young children. It’s certainly the case that my wife is working much harder than I am at most any moment of time. Yet the market values her work at zero, even though it’s some of the most important work that anyone can do. So, it’s not that universal basic income is going to mitigate work, it’s just going to broaden the definition of what we mean by work. . . I’m very much of the opinion that most humans enjoy work, but it should be work that comes from a place not of economic deprivation but of human goals and values. Giving everyone $1000 a month as in my plan would create 4.5 million new jobs, because businesses would thrive and people would start new organizations and companies born out of their own values. So that’s one of the fundamental misconceptions, to think that something like the freedom dividend somehow weakens the need for work. The goal is to broaden and redefine what we mean by work, and let more and more people discover for themselves the work they want to do.
DN: So you see it as enabling?
AY: Yeah, I was considering language like calling it an “empowerment net” instead of a “safety net.” Because the customary language around it is phrased in a particular way that in my mind is very limiting.
DN: Do you see UBI and other policy points that you’re making as things that will affect the American mindset? For example, you speak at some length about the “rampant financial stress that’s the new normal” in American society. We’re a very wealth country, but even people who are rather comfortable lead rather stressful lives. When you talk about “humanity first,” are you talking about relieving some of this pressure-cooker, rat-race mentality that dominates American life?
AY: Very much so. You can see it again in the numbers, where our fertility rate, the rate at which people are having children, is now at a record low. Because in part of the financial stress that you’re talking about. I know many young people who are questioning their ability to have children because they don’t think they can afford them. So it’s affecting us in the most fundamental of ways. And this economic stress is hurting, and it includes many people who are highly educated, in part because the costs in places like New York and San Francisco and Seattle and D.C. and other cities have surged to such unprecedented levels where even if you were making what would have been a fine living in many contexts, you feel like you’re strapped for cash on a monthly basis. Our system of institutional capitalism is not serving us well, and we created it. We invented GDP (Gross Domestic Product) less than a hundred years ago. There’s no reason that we necessarily have to ride this system off a cliff, which is where it’s taking us right now, and that includes the day-to-day living experiences of tens of millions of Americans who don’t feel like they’re thriving and prospering and can never get ahead.
DN: You’d advocate for different yardsticks for economic success than GDP?
AY: Yes, we need to more directly measure how we are progressing as a people, so my measurements would include things like median income and wealth, mental health and freedom from substance abuse, childhood success rates, quality adjusted life expectancy, proportion of elderly in quality situations, environmental quality. And we have the sophistication now where we can measure these things, and build a scorecard, and then use additional social currency to reward both individual and corporate behaviors that help improve these things. So, if you can imagine a company saying, hey, we’re going to bring down the obesity rate in Mississippi, or we’re going to bring up the graduation rate in Ohio. So these are things that are fundamental, but right now the monetary market would value that activity at zero. So we need to have different measurements than GDP and stock market, because they may continue to rise even as more and more Americans are left behind by advancing technologies.
DN: GDP will go up if a hurricane goes through a city and causes mass destruction. It will require reconstruction, so therefore it creates some jobs and generates cash flow, so the hurricane ends up being a net positive for GDP, even though thousands of ordinary lives may have been negatively affected, or even lost.
AY: That’s exactly the case, where GDP can be something of a perverse measurement that measures activities independent of whether those activities are things we’re excited about. Nobody’s excited about repairing a city after a hurricane, even though that’s going to end up bringing GDP up. So, we need to focus more on things that will actually advance us, because GDP is a discredited instrument that we invented that is now guiding us in ways that it was never designed to. Even the inventor of GDP said it’s a terrible measurement for national well-being.
DN: Right, he said don’t rely on this alone. The Dow is another. Anyone who watches the news knows that the Dow Industrial Average is the first things they talk about in the few seconds they devote to economic news. Somehow the perceived value of corporate shares is what our entire economy seems to pivot on. Would there be anything on your agenda to address the degree to which Wall Street is the tail that wags the dog in the American economy?
AY: If you look at the numbers, the bottom 48% of Americans own zero stock. The bottom 80% own only eight percent of the stock market value. So anytime you see the Dow Jones index or the NASDAQ we’re really talking about things that directly impact only the top 20 percent of Americans. And our fixation on corporate results every quarter is making even the CEOs and directors of those companies miserable. They feel like they’re captive to these short-term goals all the time. . . So the media-industrial complex is certainly not helping matters by just focusing on these very simple measurements that are the easiest to see and determine, that end up promoting a mindset that what’s good for the stock market is what’s good for the American people, when really what’s good for the stock market is financially good for about 20% of the American people. . . With record income inequality. . . to me it’s enlightened self-interest for us to adopt a new paradigm as fast as we can. . . because studies have shown that even the well-off are less happy in a highly unequal society.
DN: Steven Pinker talks about income inequality in his book, Enlightenment Now, and he’s got some interesting observations. Apparently, studies seem to show that people are really not so obsessed with equality, but what really gets under people’s skin is a sense of unfairness. So that even in a relatively prosperous society, where very few are starving and in fact the poorest of people are struggling with obesity, even in a society like that, people get very irate if there’s a prevalent sense of unfairness. It seems to me that basic income would be one solution to that. We’re not saying that everything is going to be equal now, but we’re trying to make things more fair.
AY: Oh yes. Most anyone who’s paying attention can sense that our current economy is deeply unfair, that economic rewards are being determined largely by proximity to certain technology or financial companies, or living in certain school districts or being able to send your kids to certain schools
DN: Or having certain family, for that matter.
AY: Having certain family. Essentially we’re entering an era where privilege is ossifying in various regions.
DN: As Paul Krugman of the New York Times says, a dumb rich kid is much more likely than a smart poor kid to go to college.
AY: Yeah, if you look at the numbers, Americans are moving between states at multi-decade lows. So our ability to shift between regions for new opportunities is actually diminishing. So their sense of unfairness is just going to rise, because people are catching on to the reality of this economy. I’ll also observe that UBI would be fantastic at helping to level the playing field at least somewhat for women who do the vast majority of the uncompensated work in our society and are persistently paid less and have lower savings. And people of color, who suffer from much less access to opportunities, where $1000 a month obviously goes much further in households and communities that have less. So that’s another virtue of UBI, to increase fairness in society. . .
DN: It seems that you could point to that sense of unfairness as explaining in large part the rise of Donald Trump and people like him. There’s this segment of society that feels very strongly that it’s been treated unfairly. And they’re actually correct about that to some degree, but instead of looking at the true source of the unfairness, which is more or less systemic, politicians point to Mexicans, immigrants, minorities—anybody but the real cause—and thus we are in a very divided country now because of that. We’ve got a lot of angry people, but they’re directing their anger in the wrong direction.
AY: Yeah, it’s much easier to get angry at people that are different from you than to get angry at an economic system, or software, or the fact that now factories don’t require as many humans as they used to. It’s one reason why our political conversation is descending into such chaos, is that you have Trump presenting certain causes for the economic dislocation, and then you have Democrats who have no idea who or what to blame. So they’re left just saying that Trump is bad and wrong, which—I mean Trump is wrong (laughs) but it’s still not addressing the root cause, which if you look at the numbers you can see, it’s advancing technologies and automation of labor that’s driving more and more Americans into distress.
DN: Do you think that part of the problem is that to really look at those issues—even though you realize that these are issues today, and that solutions like UBI are solutions for today—that to the average American and certainly the average politician, the problem is still down the road? They can punt for a while rather than address it and bring on these serious solutions. Are politicians too short sighted?
AY: Well, I was in Washington, D.C., last month, and someone said something to me that will stick with me for a long time. He said Washington, D.C., is not a town of leaders, it is a town of migrants and followers, and that people in D.C. will get on board with something after the rest of the country has figured it out already. So looking for D.C. for leadership is looking in the wrong place. They’re typically going to be 20 or 30 years behind. If you look at the demographics of our leaders, no offense to anyone, but I think it’s unlikely that a 68-year-old man is going to understand the nuances of technology and what it’s doing to the labor force. (laughs) So that’s one reason why I’m running. Our institutions just aren’t up to the challenge. And we have to take the reins ourselves, as fast as we can.
DN: To be competitive in the Democratic race, you’ll have to get on the primary ballots across the country. Do you anticipate any problems with that?
AY: Certainly we’ll make it happen in the early states guaranteed, and we’re hopeful that we can make it happen in all fifty states, which I’m very optimistic about. We get volunteers every day from everyplace from Montana to Hawaii coming to support us, in large part because people are waking up to the reality that our economy has changed for good, and that we need dramatic new solutions to account for the fact that we’re going through the greatest technological and economic transition in human history. And, for whatever reason, our leaders have seemed to not acknowledge it much less address it.
