The War on Normal People — Book Review & Quotes
Review
When I look at politicians, I rarely see characteristics that I can relate to. Andrew Yang, coming from a tech background, is already someone I can more easily relate to. But more than anything, as an investor I see every day the companies that are being built specifically to replace people. We don’t talk about it in terms of ‘lost jobs’ but rather increased efficiencies. But automation is a real and systemic issue that will affect every facet of our lives.
I set out to read books written by some of the folks running for president in 2020. This year, I read books by Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang. They couldn’t be more different, largely given the intense focus of Andrew Yang’s message. Automation is a critical part of every issue, and we don’t discuss it nearly enough.
The stark reality of automation and the impact it will have on the social contract our society is built on has been given little more than lip service. One quote puts the seriousness of the situation into perspective.
“Yuval Harari, the Israeli scholar, suggests that ‘the way we treat stupid people in the future will be the way we treat animals today.’ If we’re going to fix things to keep his vision from coming true, now is the time.”
The significant changes that automation will bring to the way we live will truly be a revelation. “As Bismarck said, ‘if revolution there is to be, let us rather undertake it not undergo it.’ Society will change either before or after the revolution, I choose before.”
There were two particular threads in Yang’s book that stuck out to me. The broader idea of ownership, of our institutions, our behavior, our towns, our economy, and then some specific commentary on parenting.
Ownership
Yang’s key proposal is a Freedom Dividend, giving every adult in America $1,000 per month, no questions asked. Among a variety of benefits, the reason he calls it a dividend is to compare it receiving a dividend from a company when you’re a shareholder. Making you feel like a shareholder of the country changes the paradigm.
What stuck out to me was a story about people living in small towns, and how difficult it can be when people you want to live in your hometown, but it’s not great and there isn’t much you can do about it.
“‘It is complicated for people who live in Gary, Indiana. They don’t want to move because this is what they are used to. Do you want to go and do your own thing or be with your family? They say places are what you make them, but it’s hard to make something beautiful when it is shit.’”
An ESOP is an employee stock ownership plan. Some companies are structured so that they are employee-owned. What if a city was run like an ESOP? Or the country? What if you could reap the benefits of what you build? You wouldn’t feel like a disappointed bystander when it comes to your town’s outcomes, you would feel like an owner. Incentivized to make things better, to make things work.
Ownership changes the way everyone thinks.
“You are not buying a stock, you are buying part ownership in a business. You will do well if the business does well.” (Warren Buffett)
Parenting
Another smaller point that I felt Yang made well was his thoughts around parenting. He has two sons, and emphasizes the lack of success we’re having in raising future generations.
“Frederick Douglas wrote that ‘It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.’ What he left out is that it’s also very hard to build strong children.”
“At a time when raising and educating children and forming our human capital is of the utmost importance, we’re heading in the other direction.”
I don’t know what the answers are to every problem we face. But I do know that everything will fail if we let our children fail to live up to their potential, to find opportunities, to succeed.
Conclusion
Andrew Yang is an outlier presidential candidate. He is not the front-runner or most likely to succeed. But he has done quite well, and in my opinion his success is due in large part to acknowledging a simple fact — no one knows what they’re doing, and we have to acknowledge the broader problems that our society needs to address.
“I have been in the room with the people who are meant to steer our society. The machinery is weak. The institutionalization is high. The things you fear to be true are generally true. I wrote this book because I want others to see what I see. We are capable of so much better.”
Quotes
“Right now some of the smartest people in the country are trying to figure out how to replace you with an overseas worker, a cheaper version of you, or, increasingly, a widget, software program, or robot. There’s no malice in it. The market rewards business leaders for making things more efficient. Efficiency doesn’t love normal people. It loves getting things done in the most cost-effective way possible.”
“We have an indebted state rife with infighting, dysfunction, and outdated ideas and bureaucracies from bygone eras, along with a populace that cannot agree on basic facts like vote totals or climate change. Our politicians offer half-hearted solutions that will at best nibble at the edges of the problem. The budget for research and development in the Department of Labor is only $4 million. We have a 1960s-era government that has few solutions to the problems of 2018.”
“As Bismarck said, ‘if revolution there is to be, let us rather undertake it not undergo it.’ Society will change either before or after the revolution, I choose before.”
“We need to establish an updated form of capitalism — I call it Human-Centered Capitalism or Human Capitalism.”
“We must simultaneously become more dynamic and more empathetic as a society.”
“We are more than the numbers on our paychecks — and we are going to have to prove it very quickly.”
“The companies of the future simply don’t need as many people as the companies of earlier eras, and more of their employees have specialized skills.”
“As MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson puts it: ‘People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and our organizations aren’t keeping up.’”
“The consensus view is that about half of Americans live in the suburbs, and that this still represents the most common type of home for most Americans.”
“We tend to use the stock market’s performance as a shorthand indicator of national well-being. However, the median level of stock market investment is close to zero. Only 52 percent of Americans own any stock through a stock mutual fund or a self-directed 401(k) or IRA, and the bottom 80 percent of Americans only own 8 percent of all stocks. Yes, the top 20 percent own 92 percent of stock market holdings. This means that the average American benefits minimally from a rising stock market beyond the wealth effect, which is that the rich people around them spend more money and the economy is more buoyant.”
“On average, a single Macy’s store generates about $36 million a year. At current sales tax and property tax rates, that store, if closed, would leave a budget hole of several million dollars for the state and county to deal with.”
“You could see all the hallmarks of people leading lives in a once-thriving economy — hair salons, day care centers, coffee shops, and so on — but as the economy decayed, people left and businesses closed. The value of all of those buildings, storefronts, and homes went from hugely positive to hugely negative.”
“‘The recession led to this huge wiping out of one-industry towns, particularly in those places that were heavily dependent on the industrial or manufacturing economy,’ says Steve Glickman, CEO of the Economic Innovation Group. ‘We’re asking: What’s around the corner for them? And we’re seeing a shockingly low rate of new businesses that can become the new employers for those regions of the country.’”
“Taking even a fraction of the 3.5 million truckers off the road will have ripple effects far and wide. It is impossible to overstate the importance of truck drivers to regional economies around the country. As many as 7.2 million workers serve the needs of truck drivers at truck stops, diners, motels, and other businesses around the country. Over 2,000 truck stops around the country serve as dedicated hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, and entertainment hubs for truckers every day. If one assumes that each trucker spends only $5K a year on consumption on the road (about $100 a week), that’s a $17.5 billion economic hit in communities around the country.”
“The Federal Reserve categorizes about 62 million jobs as routine — or approximately 44 percent of total jobs. The Fed calls the disappearance of these middle-skill jobs ‘job polarization,’ meaning we will be left with low-end service jobs and high-end cognitive jobs and very little in between. This trend goes hand-in-hand with the disappearance of the American middle class and the startlingly high income inequality in the United States.”
“There is now big money pouring into trying to process all of this information — one estimate is that a typical Fortune 1000 company could make another $65 million a year by increasing its use of data by 10 percent, and that only 0.5 percent of available data is presently being analyzed and used. Another estimate is that the health care system could save $300 billion per year — or $1,000 per citizen per year — with improved use of data.”
“The purpose and nature of work is going to change a lot in the next 10 years. The question is what will drive this change aside from the fact that fewer of us will have jobs to go to.”
“The automation wave is coming in part because, if your sole goal is to get work done, people are much trickier to deal with than machines. Acknowledging this is not a bad thing — it is a necessary step toward finding solutions. It may push us to think more deeply about what makes humanity valuable.”
“Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.’ Unfortunately that may described a vast majority of us. The challenge we must overcome is that humans need work more than work needs us.”
“There is an almost magical embracing of ignorance cloaked in humility: ‘It is unknowable what the new jobs will be. It is beyond human wisdom. It would be arrogant to guess. I just know that they will be there.’ Oftentimes, the person who thinks all will be okay is guilty of what I call constructive institutionalism — operating from a default stance that things will work themselves out.”
“When newspapers began shifting from paper-based to online publishing, people complained that ‘we’re trading analogue dollars for digital nickels and dimes.’ That’s what’s going to happen with workers. We’re going to trade 100 high school graduates for 5 or 10 college graduates someplace else.”
“In reality, studies have shown that retraining programs, as currently practiced, tend to show few, if any benefits.”
“The real test of the impact of automation will come in the next downturn. Companies will look to replace their call centers and customer service departments with artificial intelligence and hybrid bot-worker arrangements. Fast food CEOs will experiment with robot burger flippers. Freight companies will embrace cost savings. Large companies will question why their accounting and legal bills are so high. And on and on.”
“We joked at Venture For America that ‘smart’ people in the United States will do one of six things in six places: finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine, or academia in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington D.C. Conventional wisdom says the ‘smartest’ things to do today are to head to Wall Street and become a finance wizard or go to Silicon Valley and become a tech genius.”
“Cheap T-shirts, a booming stock market, and a wide array of apps are cold comfort when you don’t own any stock and your local factory or main street closes.”
“Instead of seeing college as a period of intellectual exploration, many young people now see it as a mass sort or cull that determines one’s future prospects and lot in life.”
“Julie Lythcott-Haims, a dean of Stanford, wrote a book in 2015 about changing the character of the students she was seeing, who had gone in one generation from independent young adults to ‘brittle’ and ‘existentially impotent.’ In 2014, an American College Health Association survey of close to 100,000 college students reported that 86 percent felt overwhelmed by all they had to do, 54 percent felt overwhelming anxiety, and 8 percent seriously considered suicide in the last 12 months.”
“It turns out that depressed, indebted, risk-averse young people generally don’t start companies. This will have effects for decades to come.”
“You may find this objectionable. Here’s the thing — it is not the innovator’s job to figure out the social implications of what they do. Their job is to create and fund innovation in the market as cost-effectively as possible. This is itself a difficult job. It is our job to account for society. That is, it’s the job of our government and our leaders.”
“We say success in America is about hard work and character. It’s not really. Most of success today is about how good you are at certain tests and what kind of family background you have, with some exceptions sprinkled in to try and make it all seem fair.”
“Yuval Harari, the Israeli scholar, suggests that ‘the way we treat stupid people in the future will be the way we treat animals today.’ If we’re going to fix things to keep his vision from coming true, now is the time.”
“The income level at which point income volatility stopped being a problem at about $105,000 per year, a level far out of reach for most families.”
“Studies show that people on a diet are continuously distracted and fare worse on various mental tasks. The same goes for sleep-deprived people, lonely people, people with their phone on the table in front of them, and poor people who are asked to think about money.”
“One of the things that has struck me about the age of the Internet is that having the world’s information at our disposal does not seem to have made us any smarter. If anything, it’s kind of the opposite. Most of us find ourselves struggling with scarcity of time, money, empathy, attention, or bandwidth in some combination. It is one of the greatest perversions of automation that just when advancing technology should be creating more of a feeling of abundance for us all, it is instead activating economic insecurity in most of the population. It’s quite plausible that as steady and predictable work and income become more and more rare, our culture is becoming dumber, more impulsive, and even more racist and misogynist due to an increased bandwidth tax as people jump from island to island trying to stay one step ahead of the economic tide. One could argue that it is essential for any democracy to do all it can to keep its population free of a mindset of scarcity in order to make better decisions.” — Democracy depends on a well-informed and educated public
“‘It is complicated for people who live in Gary, Indiana. They don’t want to move because this is what they are used to. Do you want to go and do your own thing or be with your family? They say places are what you make them, but it’s hard to make something beautiful when it is shit.’” — What if there was a way to structure an ESOP but for towns? Could citizens yield the benefits of the success of their towns?
“The central point is this: In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, trust, and cohesion — the stuff of civilization — are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship.”
“Frederick Douglas wrote that ‘It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.’ What he left out is that it’s also very hard to build strong children.”
“At a time when raising and educating children and forming our human capital is of the utmost importance, we’re heading in the other direction.”
“After someone is on disability, there’s a massive disincentive to work, because if you work and show that you’re able-bodied, you lose benefits. As a result, virtually no one recovers from disability. The churn rate nationally is less than 1 percent. David Autor asserts that Social Security Disability Insurance today essentially serves as unemployment insurance around the country. It’s not designed for this, but that’s what it is for hundreds of thousands of Americans. One judge who administers disability decisions said that ‘if the American public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits.’”
“‘Every society has a ‘bad men’ problem,’ says Tyler Cowen, the economist and author of Average Is Over. He projects a future where a relative handful of high-productivity individuals creates most of the value, while low-skilled people become preoccupied with cheap digital entertainment to stay happy and organize their lives.” — Rise up and be men
“Many men have within us the man-child who’s still in that basement. The fortunate among us have left him behind, but we understand his appeal all too well. He’s still there waiting — ready to take over in case our lives fall apart.”
“The progress of a few fortunate decades can too easily be swept away by a few years of trouble.” (Ryan Avent) — The United States is only a little more than 29 decades old
“Public faith in the medical system, the media, public schools, and government are all at record lows compared to past eras.”
“We have entered an age of transparency where we can see our institutions and leaders for all their flaws. Trust is for the gullible. Everything now will be a fight. Appealing to common interests will be all the more difficult.”
“America has been getting less violent in most measurable ways — violent crimes and protests are all less common than in the past, even though it doesn’t seem like it. For example, there were approximately 2,500 leftist bombings in America between 1971 and 1972, which would seem unfathomable today. It’s possible that we may already be too defeated and opiated by the market to mount a revolution. We might just settle for making hateful comments online and watching endless YouTube videos with only occasional flare-ups of violence amid many quiet suicides.”
“There are approximately 270 to 310 million firearms in the United States, almost one per human being. We are the most heavily armed society in the history of mankind — disintegration is unlikely to be gentle.”
“Hatred is easy, as is condemnation. Addressing the conditions that breed hatred is very hard.”
“Robert Kennedy famously said that GDP ‘does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play…it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’ We have to start thinking more about what makes life worthwhile.”
Referring to his Freedom Dividend — “it would give all citizens an honest stake in society and a sense of the future.” (ESOP for society.)
“The biggest companies, like Amazon, would pay the most into the system because VAT gets paid based on volume, not profits. It also would make it so that we’d all root for progress — the mechanic in Appalachia would feel like he’s getting a stake every time someone gets rich.”
“‘GiveDirectly…has sent shock-waves through the charity sector,’ posited one article in the Guardian. ‘[Organizations] that ask for money on behalf of the poor should be able to prove they can do more good with it than the poor themselves…[for most NGOs] this is a compelling challenge.’ Basically, the global poor would be better served if most aid organizations got out of the way and handed them the money.”
“By definition, none of the money would be wasted because it goes to citizens. It’s analogous to a company giving dividends or moneys to its shareholders. No one regards that as a waste of money, because the shareholders theoretically are the owners of the company.”
“Replacing work is going to be a generational challenge. It will require the great minds and hearts of this era. But getting money to live is an independent question. Getting money to live independent of work will enable us to figure out what work we actually want to do, even if that work is not necessarily in an office or store. This is a much deeper and more fundamental question than how one survives month to month.”
“The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth. There’s a tendency for rich people to dismiss poor people as weak-willed children with no cost discipline. The evidence runs in the other direction. As the Dutch philosopher Rutger Bregmann and others put it, ‘Poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.’”
“To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.” (Bertrand Russell) — sometimes doing nothing is the most important something
“There will also be a dramatic expansion of painting, making music, shooting videos, playing sports, writing, and all of the creative pursuits many Americans would love to try, but can’t seem to find the time for today. Many people have some artistic passion that they would pursue if they didn’t need to worry about feeding themselves next month. A UBI would be perhaps the greatest catalyst to human creativity we have ever seen.”
“200 communities around the United States [are using a system] called time banking. Time banking is a system through which people trade time and build credits within communities by performing various helpful tasks.”
“Edgar Cahn, the founder of Time Banking, was the former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy, who was looking for new ways to fight poverty at a time when ‘money for social programs [had] dried up.’ He wrote, ‘Americans face at least three interlocking sets of problems: growing inequality in access by those at the bottom to the most basic goods and services; increasing social problems stemming from the need to rebuild family, neighborhood and community; and a growing disillusion with public programs designed to address these problems.’ He proposed that time banking could ‘[rebuild] the infrastructure of trust and caring that can strengthen families and communities.’”
“Human Capitalism would have a few core tenets:
- Humanity is more important than money
- The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar
- Markets exist to serve our common goals and values
“In order for humanity to trump capital, the state must represent the public interest above all. The goal should be to create a leadership class that can welcome the hatred of others with no fear of getting frozen out of opportunities afterward.” — could any politician welcome the hatred of others?
“For Human Capitalism to take hold, we need leaders who can truly ignore the market. That’s the first step.”
“Tristan wrote, ‘Imagine hundreds of engineers whose job every day is to invent new ways to keep you hooked.’ Another technologist lamented that ‘the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.’ And they’re succeeding.”
“The Cleveland Clinic has achieved financial success in part by universalizing a sense of cost control. They put price tags on things so everyone knows how much it costs to, say, open up a new set of sutures. They don’t allow redundant tests. They include doctors in purchasing decisions. Everyone is interested in the company’s financial sustainability because they feel a sense of ownership and mission. Plus, if the hospital does well, you’re more likely to get a raise.”
“We have so many brilliant doctors — they should be innovators, detectives, guides, and sources of comfort, not glorified assembly line workers. And freeing health care from being locked to a job would be a massive boon to economic growth and dynamism.”
“Sal [the founder of Khan Academy], gave an inspiring talk that night. The high point went something like this: ‘Back in the Middle Ages, if you asked the literate monks and scholars how many of the farmers and peasants walking around would be capable of learning to read, they’d scoff and say, ‘Read? Most of these peasants could never learn to do something like that.’ They might guess that 2 or 3 percent of the peasants would be capable of becoming literate. Today we know that the real number is closer to 99 percent. Virtually everyone is capable of learning to read. But if I ask you today how many people are smart enough to study quantum physics, you might say only 2 or 3 percent. This is as shortsighted as the monks were in the Middle Ages. We are just scratching the surface of how smart people can become if we give them the proper tools to learn. In the years ahead, we will find that people are capable of much more than we can imagine.’”
“Our fixation on college readiness leads our high school curricula toward purely academic subjects and away from life skills.”
“People teach other people. If you want to teach thousands of students well, you teach one student well. Then you do it thousands of times.”
“Only 6 percent of American high school students were enrolled in a vocational course of study in 2013, compared to 42 percent in the United Kingdom, 59 percent in Germany, and 67 percent in the Netherlands.”
“In his book Self and Soul, Mark Edmundson, a University of Virginia professor, writes that Western culture historically prized three major ideals:
- The Warrior: His or her highest quality is courage. Historical archetypes include Achilles, Hector, and Joan of Arc
- The Saint: His or her highest quality is compassion. Historical archetypes include Jesus Christ and Mother Theresa
- The Thinker: His or her highest quality is contemplation. Historical archetypes include Plato, Kant, Rousseau, and Ayn Rand
“Edmundson mourns that these ideals today have been largely abandoned. The new ideal is what he calls ‘the Worldly Self of middle-class values.’ To get along and get ahead. To succeed and self-replicate. The three great ideals live on in diluted form (e.g. spin classes and Spartan races for the Warrior, nonprofits and social entrepreneurship for the Saint, Ta-Nehisi Coates and blogosphere for the Thinker). But anyone who pursues one of these ideals to their extremes in modern life would seem ridiculous, impractical, unworldly, and even unbalanced. I’m sure most college students would agree.”
“Personal qualities today are increasingly marginalized in favor of technocratic, market-driven skills. Instead, finance is the new courage, branding is the new compassion, and coding is the new contemplation. Schools today don’t believe it’s their place to teach toward the big questions. They can barely remember what ideals look like. If they can remember, there will be much more hope for us all.”
“I have been in the room with the people who are meant to steer our society. The machinery is weak. The institutionalization is high. The things you fear to be true are generally true. I wrote this book because I want others to see what I see. We are capable of so much better.”
