Andrew Yang is a 43-year-old American entrepreneur who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2020. His campaign focuses on solving the problem of job losses to automation—an issue many politicians seem happy to ignore. Starting right now, Yang wants to create a whole new kind of economy from the ground up, in which automation is transformed from a threat into the foundation for widespread human flourishing.
Briefly, his policy proposals include implementing a form of Universal Basic Income (also known as UBI, or what he calls the “Freedom Dividend”), universal healthcare, a “digital social currency,” and a redefinition of GDP that more accurately reflect the health of the nation. If this sounds like socialism then, according to Yang, your thinking about the economy might be antiquated. He contends that the capitalism/socialism spectrum is no longer relevant or useful if we take an honest look at the modern world.
The following is a transcription of my phone conversation with Andrew Yang, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Andrew Yang: You would expect the current trends that we’re seeing to accelerate. Many of the trends I’m most concerned about will accelerate with either a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, because we’re talking about how technology is going to displace millions of retail workers, call center workers, fast food workers, and truck drivers. And there’s no dramatic halting of that trend that would occur if a different political party were in office.
Now, if I were president, my goal would be to accelerate meaningful countermeasures and solutions. That does not mean putting a stop to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles, but that we need to dramatically reshape the way that both value and work are experienced in our society. And that’s a generational challenge. It’s not going to happen overnight.
What I’m most concerned about is the trends we’ve seen of the automation of four million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. between 2000 and 2015. When that gets applied to retail workers and truck drivers and fast food workers, which are some of the most common jobs in the U.S. economy, we’ll witness a continued disintegration of American society, which we can see in the numbers right now.
A lot of the automation is happening more quickly than almost anyone projected. I think I just read this week that Waymo is releasing its autonomous taxis in 2019. Do you think that this is going to sneak up on everyone in the next couple of years?
Well, I’m going to use call centers as an example. There are about 2.5 million call center workers in the United States right now making $14 an hour—typically high school graduates. So, if you’re reading this right now, how long is it going to be before Artificial Intelligence can outperform the average call center worker?
Let’s say that timeframe is two or three years. How many call center workers will that effect? How many will be out of a job shortly thereafter? And so that’s not speculative at all. That’s something that we know Google and other companies are working on right now.
If you take that one fact pattern and apply it over and over again in the economy, you’ll wind up with a massive displacement of workers. And it will sneak up on us quite quickly because that replacement of call center workers won’t affect five or ten thousand workers; it may well effect 500,000 or a million.
I know that it might take a while, even in the best case scenario, to implement Universal Basic Income or some of the other measures you’re proposing. So, is it already too late? Are we already going to see a massive dip in jobs because of automation and then huge swaths of the country are out of work?
It’s a little late in the day, truly. If you look at the labor force participation rate in the U.S., it peaked around 2000 and has declined ever since over the last 18 years—to a point where now it’s 62.9 percent, which is the same level as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. And almost one out of five prime working-age men—between the ages of 21 and 30—have not worked in the last 12 months.
So, this is already with us. If you wait until the truckers start to riot and the taxi drivers start to riot—then it is late in the day. And that’s one of the reasons I’m running for president now. If I can get to the Oval Office and make this happen in 2021, then we can at least be able to prevent some of the disintegration that accompanies loss of work.
By the numbers, when men in particular get idle, we tend to degenerate into self-destructive and antisocial behaviors. You can see that in the surge of suicides among middle-aged Americans around the country that have brought down our country’s life expectancy over the last two years—and the fact that eight Americans are dying of opiates every hour. Again, if you look beneath the surface, all of these trends are already here with us. (...)
I am curious about how Democrats are addressing this—or not addressing this. Just this week Bernie Sanders was on Facebook saying that workers at Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, need to unionize so that they can keep their jobs and not be displaced by robots. To me this seems possibly shortsighted, but do you see any role for unionizing jobs to keep them around?
There are a few different approaches to this. And one of the things I disagree with Bernie Sanders on is that I believe he has a vision of the economy that functions like it did decades ago, where the path to prosperity is to get fair treatment by employers for workers. That relies upon a notion of the economy where, in order for a company to succeed and grow, it needs to hire more and more people and it needs to treat them well.
Unfortunately, we’re increasingly entering an age where companies can become very, very successful and profitable without hiring lots of people. And then when it does hire people, the most efficient way for them to do so is as temporary or gig workers or contract workers or outsourced workers. And so, trying to force companies to change their employment models, and then empowering workers through unions to do so, might be the right thing to do in some contexts; but in my opinion, it’s highly unlikely to solve the problem because we’ve been heading in this direction for decades, and in some ways Bernie Sanders’ solution is an attempt to turn back the clock.
As an example, let’s say that you were a fast food restaurant, and you’re paying your employees $10 an hour. Then, fast food workers quite rightfully say, hey, we can’t live on that; we need to be paid $15 an hour. So, one approach could be to say, the fast food workers should unionize and then bargain for $15 an hour. Another approach might be for the fast food companies to say—and they would do this if they had to pay $15 an hour in many instances—that maybe we can make our locations work with fewer workers.
At that point, you have to ask yourself whether you would purposefully want the fast food company to not automate its locations for the purpose of having more people in jobs that pay them between $10 and $15 an hour. And that becomes a very interesting question about what you think the purpose of jobs is.
If the purpose of jobs is to get a certain task done, then you would obviously want to automate that task because if the fast food company can serve the food with fewer workers, then that would be a good thing. If you think jobs are a way to maintain social order and make sure that someone has to be somewhere for certain shifts of the day—and that, without that, that person would struggle to find a degree of structure or purpose—then maybe you say, let’s make these fast food companies employ people just for the sake of it. That to me is a really fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves.
Outside politics, I do see a lot of intellectuals talking about how we need to redefine jobs. I know Steven Pinker recently said that we need to protect the interests of people, not the interests of jobs. Do you think it’s possible for the country at large to ever shift their perspective on jobs like this, where we don’t worry about loss of jobs, we worry about loss of human wellbeing?
I completely believe it is possible. And I think that the Freedom Dividend—the Universal Basic Income—that I’m proposing and will implement as president would enable that shift in a real way for millions of Americans quite quickly.
I will say that if you dig into the data, you find that men and women experience idleness differently. …Women who are idle, I believe, would very, very naturally adopt this project-based approach that you’re talking about. The data shows that women who are out of work get involved in the community and go back to school and do things that are quite productive and pro-social. Whereas, men who are out of work spend 75 percent of their time on the computer playing videogames and surfing porn—and then tend to devolve into substance abuse and self-destructive behaviors. Men who are out of work volunteer less than employed men, even though they have more time. And so, men and women seem to experience idleness differently.
When you talk about this project-based approach to work—for women it would be entirely natural and attainable, in my opinion, for many, many women. And for many men it would be as well. But for some men it might be less natural. …The providing of structure and purpose and fulfillment to millions of relatively unskilled men who are making transitions over the next number of years is one of the great projects of this age. (...)
You hold yourself out as a strong capitalist, which separates your campaign from Bernie Sanders, who embraces the term ‘democratic socialism.’ Do you have any strong feelings about the term socialism? Do you think it’s ever something that you’ll incorporate into the branding of your campaign, or are you shying away from that?
My honest feeling is that the entire capitalism/socialism framing is decades old and unproductive. So, what I’m suggesting is that we need to evolve to the next stage of capitalism, which prioritizes human wellbeing and development. If someone were to say to me, for example, hey, you’re for universal health care, and that’s an idea I associate with socialists…I would shrug and say, sure. [Laughs.] You know? I just think the labels are unfortunate. People have very strong associations with each one.
A friend of mine, Eric Weinstein, said a couple of things that I thought were very profound. First, he said we never knew that capitalism was going to be eaten by its son—technology. Second, we have to become both radically capitalist and radically socialist in different aspects of American life and the economy. And I think both of those things are true.
I just don’t think it’s constructive to try and pick a spot in this arbitrary capitalism/socialism spectrum. What I believe is we have to redefine our economy and re-write the rules so that it centers around us. Capitalism’s efficiency and GDP are going to have an increasingly nonexistent relationship to how most Americans are doing.
[ed. See also: America has become a gerontocracy. We must change that.]
Briefly, his policy proposals include implementing a form of Universal Basic Income (also known as UBI, or what he calls the “Freedom Dividend”), universal healthcare, a “digital social currency,” and a redefinition of GDP that more accurately reflect the health of the nation. If this sounds like socialism then, according to Yang, your thinking about the economy might be antiquated. He contends that the capitalism/socialism spectrum is no longer relevant or useful if we take an honest look at the modern world.The following is a transcription of my phone conversation with Andrew Yang, lightly edited for length and clarity.
* * *
Peter Clarke: Let’s say Donald Trump wins again in 2020 and the government continues on its current path of ignoring automation. What can we expect to happen in the near future?Andrew Yang: You would expect the current trends that we’re seeing to accelerate. Many of the trends I’m most concerned about will accelerate with either a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, because we’re talking about how technology is going to displace millions of retail workers, call center workers, fast food workers, and truck drivers. And there’s no dramatic halting of that trend that would occur if a different political party were in office.
Now, if I were president, my goal would be to accelerate meaningful countermeasures and solutions. That does not mean putting a stop to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles, but that we need to dramatically reshape the way that both value and work are experienced in our society. And that’s a generational challenge. It’s not going to happen overnight.
What I’m most concerned about is the trends we’ve seen of the automation of four million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. between 2000 and 2015. When that gets applied to retail workers and truck drivers and fast food workers, which are some of the most common jobs in the U.S. economy, we’ll witness a continued disintegration of American society, which we can see in the numbers right now.
A lot of the automation is happening more quickly than almost anyone projected. I think I just read this week that Waymo is releasing its autonomous taxis in 2019. Do you think that this is going to sneak up on everyone in the next couple of years?
Well, I’m going to use call centers as an example. There are about 2.5 million call center workers in the United States right now making $14 an hour—typically high school graduates. So, if you’re reading this right now, how long is it going to be before Artificial Intelligence can outperform the average call center worker?
Let’s say that timeframe is two or three years. How many call center workers will that effect? How many will be out of a job shortly thereafter? And so that’s not speculative at all. That’s something that we know Google and other companies are working on right now.
If you take that one fact pattern and apply it over and over again in the economy, you’ll wind up with a massive displacement of workers. And it will sneak up on us quite quickly because that replacement of call center workers won’t affect five or ten thousand workers; it may well effect 500,000 or a million.
I know that it might take a while, even in the best case scenario, to implement Universal Basic Income or some of the other measures you’re proposing. So, is it already too late? Are we already going to see a massive dip in jobs because of automation and then huge swaths of the country are out of work?
It’s a little late in the day, truly. If you look at the labor force participation rate in the U.S., it peaked around 2000 and has declined ever since over the last 18 years—to a point where now it’s 62.9 percent, which is the same level as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. And almost one out of five prime working-age men—between the ages of 21 and 30—have not worked in the last 12 months.
So, this is already with us. If you wait until the truckers start to riot and the taxi drivers start to riot—then it is late in the day. And that’s one of the reasons I’m running for president now. If I can get to the Oval Office and make this happen in 2021, then we can at least be able to prevent some of the disintegration that accompanies loss of work.
By the numbers, when men in particular get idle, we tend to degenerate into self-destructive and antisocial behaviors. You can see that in the surge of suicides among middle-aged Americans around the country that have brought down our country’s life expectancy over the last two years—and the fact that eight Americans are dying of opiates every hour. Again, if you look beneath the surface, all of these trends are already here with us. (...)
I am curious about how Democrats are addressing this—or not addressing this. Just this week Bernie Sanders was on Facebook saying that workers at Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, need to unionize so that they can keep their jobs and not be displaced by robots. To me this seems possibly shortsighted, but do you see any role for unionizing jobs to keep them around?
There are a few different approaches to this. And one of the things I disagree with Bernie Sanders on is that I believe he has a vision of the economy that functions like it did decades ago, where the path to prosperity is to get fair treatment by employers for workers. That relies upon a notion of the economy where, in order for a company to succeed and grow, it needs to hire more and more people and it needs to treat them well.
Unfortunately, we’re increasingly entering an age where companies can become very, very successful and profitable without hiring lots of people. And then when it does hire people, the most efficient way for them to do so is as temporary or gig workers or contract workers or outsourced workers. And so, trying to force companies to change their employment models, and then empowering workers through unions to do so, might be the right thing to do in some contexts; but in my opinion, it’s highly unlikely to solve the problem because we’ve been heading in this direction for decades, and in some ways Bernie Sanders’ solution is an attempt to turn back the clock.
As an example, let’s say that you were a fast food restaurant, and you’re paying your employees $10 an hour. Then, fast food workers quite rightfully say, hey, we can’t live on that; we need to be paid $15 an hour. So, one approach could be to say, the fast food workers should unionize and then bargain for $15 an hour. Another approach might be for the fast food companies to say—and they would do this if they had to pay $15 an hour in many instances—that maybe we can make our locations work with fewer workers.
At that point, you have to ask yourself whether you would purposefully want the fast food company to not automate its locations for the purpose of having more people in jobs that pay them between $10 and $15 an hour. And that becomes a very interesting question about what you think the purpose of jobs is.
If the purpose of jobs is to get a certain task done, then you would obviously want to automate that task because if the fast food company can serve the food with fewer workers, then that would be a good thing. If you think jobs are a way to maintain social order and make sure that someone has to be somewhere for certain shifts of the day—and that, without that, that person would struggle to find a degree of structure or purpose—then maybe you say, let’s make these fast food companies employ people just for the sake of it. That to me is a really fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves.
Outside politics, I do see a lot of intellectuals talking about how we need to redefine jobs. I know Steven Pinker recently said that we need to protect the interests of people, not the interests of jobs. Do you think it’s possible for the country at large to ever shift their perspective on jobs like this, where we don’t worry about loss of jobs, we worry about loss of human wellbeing?
I completely believe it is possible. And I think that the Freedom Dividend—the Universal Basic Income—that I’m proposing and will implement as president would enable that shift in a real way for millions of Americans quite quickly.
I will say that if you dig into the data, you find that men and women experience idleness differently. …Women who are idle, I believe, would very, very naturally adopt this project-based approach that you’re talking about. The data shows that women who are out of work get involved in the community and go back to school and do things that are quite productive and pro-social. Whereas, men who are out of work spend 75 percent of their time on the computer playing videogames and surfing porn—and then tend to devolve into substance abuse and self-destructive behaviors. Men who are out of work volunteer less than employed men, even though they have more time. And so, men and women seem to experience idleness differently.
When you talk about this project-based approach to work—for women it would be entirely natural and attainable, in my opinion, for many, many women. And for many men it would be as well. But for some men it might be less natural. …The providing of structure and purpose and fulfillment to millions of relatively unskilled men who are making transitions over the next number of years is one of the great projects of this age. (...)
You hold yourself out as a strong capitalist, which separates your campaign from Bernie Sanders, who embraces the term ‘democratic socialism.’ Do you have any strong feelings about the term socialism? Do you think it’s ever something that you’ll incorporate into the branding of your campaign, or are you shying away from that?
My honest feeling is that the entire capitalism/socialism framing is decades old and unproductive. So, what I’m suggesting is that we need to evolve to the next stage of capitalism, which prioritizes human wellbeing and development. If someone were to say to me, for example, hey, you’re for universal health care, and that’s an idea I associate with socialists…I would shrug and say, sure. [Laughs.] You know? I just think the labels are unfortunate. People have very strong associations with each one.
A friend of mine, Eric Weinstein, said a couple of things that I thought were very profound. First, he said we never knew that capitalism was going to be eaten by its son—technology. Second, we have to become both radically capitalist and radically socialist in different aspects of American life and the economy. And I think both of those things are true.
I just don’t think it’s constructive to try and pick a spot in this arbitrary capitalism/socialism spectrum. What I believe is we have to redefine our economy and re-write the rules so that it centers around us. Capitalism’s efficiency and GDP are going to have an increasingly nonexistent relationship to how most Americans are doing.
by Peter Clarke, Quillette | Read more:
Image: Stephen McCarthy/Collision[ed. See also: America has become a gerontocracy. We must change that.]
