Technology Won’t Kill Your Job, Capitalism Will

Andrew Yang tells a good story but UBI won’t solve our problems

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang has built his Presidential campaign centrally around one issue: Universal Basic Income. He calls it the Freedom Dividend. UBI is an idea that’s been kicked around over the last few years as a solution to the upcoming threat of automation. The theory here is that technology is moving so rapidly that millions of jobs will be wiped out at an alarming rate soon and the solution to this is to guarantee each person a monthly income, no questions asked. Yang has proposed that it should be $1,000 a month for every adult citizen in the United States.

To his credit, Yang’s UBI movement has been pretty successful, especially for someone who has no political experience before this. He has gathered a lot of grassroots support by actually speaking on some real issues and concerns of everyday Americans. He has even polled better than Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Cory Booker, and Senator Amy Klobuchar at times.

So, does Andrew Yang and other’s theories about automation and the loss of jobs hold up? Does their UBI solution make sense in today's world?

First, we need to analyze how we got in the predicament we are in now. Forty years of neoliberal, free-market solutions…