The Case for Andrew Yang
Human kind began our journey to become what we know today as homo sapiens because of one incredible ability — the ability to create fiction. Some point to language as the key ability, but the fact remains that language is used to say something. The something that we humans uniquely can say and spin is a story. People are united by stories. From the beginning of time, there were creation myths, stories of what happened out on the hunt, stories of what will happen in the future. And these stories are united by a thread — fiction. Yuval Noah Harari in the book “Sapiens” asks the question, how did humans cross the threshold of cooperating in small clans of up to 150 to operating on a global scale forming countries of billions? He says, “The secret was probably fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths” (32). As Harari says later, “The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it” (35). We have today, by our measurements and incentives, built a society which believes in money over people. Our society today has incentivized us to believe economic value is human value and we have collectively decided to believe this myth. People are waking up to this fact, but our conversations right now are dictated by the very system we are trying to reform. We need to start asking, how do we make our system work for us and not how do we work for the system.
One of the biggest problems we face is that we have not accurately defined the problems in our society. In Jared Diamond’s book “Upheaval”, he lays out what psychologists have determined are the 12 key steps to dealing with a crisis. I won’t outline them all, but the third step to dealing with a crisis is to “build a fence, to delineate one’s individual problems needing to be solved” (39). Here I am going to focus on one big problem — economic inequality. Because money is such a big factor in determining what makes an issue here in the United States, we need to tackle this myth of money over people which we have decided to believe in by looking at money.
First, let’s take a first principle approach to determining what money is. When you hand money to your local restaurant, music teacher, or sports league what are you telling them with that money? You are telling them you value their work. Money is something we have invented to tell somebody else you value the work they are doing. It is an expression of good will towards another person. The seal of the United States on the dollar bill reads “Annuit Coeptis” or “He favors our undertaking”. In other words, I value what you do. It is not too far fetched to say that economic value is an accumulation of good will.
This seems reasonable enough. Our goal is to function as a society and it makes sense to recognize and reward behavior and actions which are a force of good — things we collectively decide are worth doing in our society. The problem is that we lost sight of the fact that money is fundamentally just an expression of good will. Ultimately a society is what determines what money should be awarded to — people determine what is worth money. And we have built a system incentivized to work for achieving this expression of good will rather than rewarding behavior and actions which are worth rewarding. We decided that getting money is more valuable than doing the things money is worth. Doing the human things money was created to reward. There is a beautiful line in the opening of the HBO show Chernobyl where the actor portraying Dr. Valery Legasov, Jared Harris, says “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”
“What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”
This is where we have gotten. We have a system incentivized to value money over people and we no longer recognize the true value of money. We no longer recognize that we are beyond what our pocketbook says we are worth. We no longer recognize that our humanity determines what is valuable. We no longer recognize that money is a fiction. It is a story that we have collectively invented, coming out of an evolutionary leap, which allows us to be bound together through a common good will for one another — “Annuit Coeptis”. We invented money to bring us and our societies closer together.
So now that we have taken a look of what money means in the first place, let’s look at the discussions and measurements we have missed surrounding money, that led us to no longer recognize the truth.
- Measuring our society
One of the biggest measures of presidential success talked about across the board is economic growth. Did the president grow the economy? Did the president create jobs? It’s not that we don’t value things like happy families, environmental health, mental health, literacy, art and music etc. It’s that we have decided to say that if GDP is growing, if jobs are created, all these things must also be true. You just have to look at American society today to know that’s not the case. By measures of GDP and unemployment, our society is doing “great”. GDP is at an all time high in the United States at $18.638 billion in real GDP (GDP adjusted for inflation). It has never been higher in the history of the United States than it is today.
Also at record highs are depression rates, suicide rates, drug overdoes. Depression rates for adults in the US are at 7.1% an increase from 6.6% to 7.3% between 2005 and 2015. Suicide rates are the highest since World War II at 14 per 100,000 in 2017. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) shows an increase in deaths from drug overdoses of roughly 7.9% EVERY YEAR from 1999 to 2017 with an increase of 16% per year between 2014 and 2017.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) shows an increase in deaths from drug overdoses of roughly 7.9% EVERY YEAR from 1999 to 2017 with an increase of 16% per year between 2014 and 2017.
What about that all time high GDP? GDP was not invented as a measurement until the Great Depression. In a time of crisis, this was designed to figure out how bad the economy was and how to make it better. But we continued to use it whether or not our nation was in a crisis. More than that, we never updated a measurement from 1934 to reflect the changing needs of our society. Simon Kuznets, the creator of GDP, when introducing it to Congress said, “economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.”. In other words, measuring the amount of money in a society does not measure how well a society is doing. The creator of GDP, the very measurement we are using today to determine the welfare of our society, said this is not a good indication of the welfare of our society. So why are we still using it as one?
“The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”
~ Simon Kuznets
The unemployment rate is at one of the lowest of all time at 3.7%. The problem with the unemployment rate is that it does not account for people who have dropped out of the work force entirely or people who are underemployed i.e. a college graduate who takes a job as a barista or another job that doesn’t require a degree. The number of Americans who aren’t in the work force and have stopped looking for work is at a multi-decade high. Right now, 37% of working-age Americans, 95 million people, are out of the work force. This is up from 70 million in 2000 (Yang p.78). We are right between El Salvador and Ukraine with a labor force participation rate of 62.90 percent. The conservative economist Nick Eberstadt says about the unemployment rate that it, “no longer serves as a reliable predictor of the numbers or proportions of people who are not working — or for that matter for those who are working”. Unemployment rate is not a good sole indicator of how many people are truly employed.
“[the unemployment rate] no longer serves as a reliable predictor of the numbers or proportions of people who are not working — or for that matter for those who are working”
~ Nick Eberstadt
Despite these facts, we continue to drive our discussions around societal well being primarily by economic well being. And take our economic well being to indicate our personal well being. So because of this, our government tells us that our lives are great. We should be happy, life should be amazing. GDP is up, unemployment is down — our society is doing great. But we see that these are inherently flawed measurements and none of us wake up in the morning excited that GDP has gone up. We wake up thinking about our friends, family, community, personal growth, mental health, etc. This is why so many people today who are my age, millennials, have checked out of politics. More than just my age, it’s true across the board for all Americans. A Gallup poll comparing trust in American institutions from the 1970’s to today shows a steep decline:
And this is totally understandable! Our system is telling us life is great when we know it isn’t. We can and need to change that.
Our system is telling us life is great when we know it isn’t. We can and need to change that.
2. Failing to identify the problem
We rightly point out some major problems in job trends — mainly the fact that the middle class is disappearing and that the top 1 percent of Americans received 52 percent of the real income growth in the US since 2009 (Yang 15). The wealth of the top one percent of Americans has grown by 278% between 1978 and 2008. And nobody is happier in this kind of society! Wealthy people experience higher levels of depression and suspicion in unequal societies (Bregman 67). As Yang says in his book “The War on Normal People”, “apparently, being high status is easer when you don’t feel bad about it” (Yang 16).
The jobs we are creating today are not long-term, stable, company jobs the likes of which we had in the 70’s. Chances are you won’t be working for a company which will employ you for years and give you a nice pension at the end of it. The age of companies investing in you as a person rather than you as capital are far behind us. In a study by economists Alan Krueger and Lawrence Katz, they found that 94% of net jobs created from 2005 to 2015 were gig, temporary, or contract jobs. The amount of people working these kinds of jobs “grew from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015” (NPR The Rise of the Contract Workforce). When people cry out, “Make America Great Again” this is part of what they mean. There used to be a time when companies, governments, labor unions all worked together to take care of them as workers. That isn’t true anymore today.
94% of net jobs created from 2005 to 2015 were gig, temporary, or contract jobs
Everyone today points to globalization as the factor causing this mass exodus of good jobs. But the fact is automation has been a much more dominant factor. A study at Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research found that 87 percent of manufacturing job losses are because of automation. As a New York Times article writes, the steel industry lost 400,000 people — 75% of its work force — between 1962 and 2005. Steel shipments however did not decline. So we have a huge increase of productivity which lets companies have less people in a factory making the same amount of product. With only 1 worker for every 4 in 2005, a steel factory can produce the same it did with 4 times that many workers in 1962. And this is true across the board. As Andrew Yang often points out, the most common jobs in this country are truck drivers, call center workers, retail clerks, cashiers at restaurants and fast food. Over 140 million Americans are going to be replaced by automation through self-driving cars, AI customer support, self-service kiosks, and much more. UPS already has self-driving trucks on the road in Arizona and McDonalds and Taco bell have already started rolling out self-service kiosks across the country.
A study at Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research found that 87 percent of manufacturing job losses are because of automation.
This isn’t just limited to blue-collar jobs. Radiologists, lawyers, therapists, accountants, journalists, court judges, investment advisors, can all be replaced by various forms of AI. AI has already been far more accurate in identifying cancerous tumors than highly trained experienced radiologists. AI is better at deciding whether to grant a defendant bail than a judge. AI is better at reviewing legal documents than people. AI is better at making investment decisions than people. Military veterans with PTSD find opening up to an AI therapist more comfortable than confiding in a human being. While that last one came out of a research project by USC researchers and is meant to be a compliment to human therapists, it’s not a leap of imagination to imagine AI therapists checking in routinely on patients. As Yang puts it, anything that is a routine job can be automated. Jobs which are non-routine are harder to automate.
As Yang puts it, anything that is a routine job can be automated. Jobs which are non-routine are harder to automate.
Looking at data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, you see this trend playing out since 1984.
You can clearly see that the jobs being created in 2015 are either manual non-routine or cognitive non-routine and anything in the middle has stagnated. The stagnated jobs corresponds to American middle class jobs. This trend goes hand in hand with the disappearance of the American middle class.
This automation revolution, what experts call “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” is unprecedented. Yes, we have encountered bouts of automation in the past which have caused major job loss, but also created a host of new jobs, jobs previously unimagined. But the scale of this automation is unprecedented. This revolution affects jobs in every industry across the board, simultaneously. More than that, the jobs that are appearing require only a handful of well educated college graduates replacing thousands of warehouse workers. As you can see from the trends above, this plays out in the data. As Yang points out in his book, “The test is not ‘will there be new jobs we haven’t predicted yet that appear?’ Of course there will be. The real test is ‘Will there be millions of new jobs for middle-aged people with low skills and levels of education near the places they currently reside?’ (74). The answer to that is a resounding no. The best job that fits those requirements that is not being automated away is a home health care aide. It’s one of the 10 occupations that has added the most new jobs in the past couple of years and these workers earned less than all of those occupations except fast food workers. And taking care of grandparents and seniors is not something a former truck driver would be excited to do especially when it only pays an average of $22,600 a year.
Many people point to retraining programs as a way to retrain displaced workers for these jobs of the future. The problem again is that the jobs being created require a high level of education and training and someone who just worked as a sales clerk or call center worker is not going to learn to be a software engineer in a months. The success rates of Federal Retraining Programs range from 0–15 percent and as a study by Mathematica Policy Research shows of a Trade Adjustment Assistance program, a federal program for displaced manufacturing workers, only 37 percent of people trained for specific jobs were actually working in those industries.
We don’t need to invest in making everyone into computer engineers and doctors — neither of these are even as sure fire job paths as people think they are. We don’t solve a problem by putting a bandaid over it. We have to attack it at its root. We have to realize that our system is incentivized for to reward how much money you make and not how human you are. When teachers, artists, musicians, caregivers, writers, community leaders, etc. are paid next to nothing while the financiers creating derivative markets that make the rich richer are getting bonuses upwards of $100,000, we have to recognize that we have lost sight of what money really values. Yang recognizes that this work is among the most valuable in our society and we need to place reshape the system so it rewards this work.
Andrew Yang has two qualities which separate him from the rest of the political and democratic pack: 1) He recognizes the need to change the INCENTIVES of the system 2) He correctly identifies the root problem beneath our issues. This combined with the fact that he has solutions for each of these problems — Universal Basic Income/The Freedom Dividend; Democracy Dollars; getting rid of GDP as the sole measurement of economic success and replacing it with an American Scorecard including factors like mental health, clean air and water, literacy, and how well our kids are doing; administrative and teacher ratio in universities; university endowments; there are too many to list. But Andrew Yang is the only candidate talking about these problems at their root and who recognizes that you cannot change how somebody thinks or acts, but you can place all the right incentives in place for them to be more likely to recognize what positive change means for themselves.
But Andrew Yang is the only candidate talking about these problems at their root and who recognizes that you cannot change how somebody thinks or acts, but you can place all the right incentives in place for them to be more likely to recognize what positive change means for themselves.
I am with most people who recognize how much of a show politics has become. How out of touch with our reality D.C. has become. How inept, inefficient, and petty the political world is in many cases. But I am not one who has given up. I am not one who thinks the system lacks any good or positive forces. And I am not one who thinks that we are doomed, that my actions are inconsequential. Andrew Yang is a candidate I may only see once in a lifetime. Someone who did not dream of being a president, but knew as one of the only people recognizing the real problems and solutions, this is what he felt he needed to do.
I have faith in our democracy. I have faith in the way we have structured our society. I believe there is a lot of good and structural soundness to it, but I believe that we have heard a lie repeated so often that we have forgotten how to distinguish the truth. Andrew Yang is that truth.
Further Reading:
“The War on Normal People” by Andrew Yang
Arguments in this Article are influenced by Yang’s book “The War on Normal People” and Yang’s 2020 Presidential Campaign
