A plan to end poverty
Q: So your signature idea is universal basic income. You call it the “freedom dividend.” Could you explain it?
A: The freedom dividend is a kind of social security guaranteeing money—my proposal is US$1000—to every citizen in the US. Unlike many social programs, recipients won’t have to pass a test or fulfill a work requirement. Such a move is necessary because in the next 12 years, one out of every three Americans are at risk of losing their jobs to tech advances. And replacement jobs will not keep up with the jobs lost. The freedom dividend can be the foundation on which a stable, prosperous, and just society can be built.
Q: Was there something you heard or read that really convinced you to get more deeply involved in universal basic income?
A: Yeah. I read a whole series of books. The first was Second Machine Age [Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2014], followed by Rise of the Robots [Martin Ford, 2015] and then Raising the Floor [Andy Stern and Lee Kravitz, 2016]. I was running an organization that was trying to create jobs so I was always reading about the future of work, and universal basic income kept coming up again and again as a very real solution. When I looked at it in depth I thought this is really what we need as a society. My experience with Venture for America convinced me that these changes are happening much faster than people believe. We’re actually right in the middle of them. So it was very natural that I would start digging into universal basic income proposals and what I thought would be most effective and sensible.
Q: Why do you think there’s so much animosity towards people who don’t or can’t work?
A: This is the Protestant work ethic baked into the culture that I believe has actually become pathological. My wife is raising our two boys—but that doesn’t count as work in our society. That counts as zero in GDP. There are all kinds of work that we know we need that don’t get measured right now. So we need to get much more broad and imaginative with the way we think about work. But Americans without work tend to degenerate into substance abuse. That’s in many ways the fundamental challenge we have to address. What would a displaced truck driver do with the remaining 20 years of his life? Now the unimaginative, brute-force approach is, “Well, let’s find some other work for that person to do.” But what if the market doesn’t have a genuine need for, like, a 52-year-old former truck driver who has a bad back and possibly other health problems? We need to start thinking and feeling differently.
Q: What if transportation jobs don’t disappear in the near future?
A: The financial incentives to automate truck driving alone are US$168 billion per year. Knowledgeable people say this is very real and it’s coming. Companies are going to deploy self-driving fleets of taxis this year.
Q: What are some reasons why Americans oppose UBI to the extent they do?
A: We go through most of our waking lives preoccupied with money and treating it like this scarce resource. So when someone says, “If you make me president I’ll provide everyone with US$1000 a month,” people immediately recoil, thinking, “It’s too good to be true.” Or worse, “That would destroy the economy”—which it categorically would not. We can easily afford a dividend of US$1000 per month per American adult. In many ways, the most fundamental battle we’re fighting is to make people look up and realize that it’s possible. People would be put more at ease, they’d be able to plan for their children’s futures, they would be able to invest more for themselves and their families. It would improve mental and physical health. And on and on. We just have to unlock people’s love for themselves.
Andrew Yang hoists a supporter’s sign after speaking at a rally in downtown Los Angeles. (courtesy of TPG Images/REUTERS)
Andrew Yang plays basketball with staff and students at Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire. (courtesy of TPG Images/REUTERS)
Andrew Yang’s parents met in California. For them the Bay Area is another hometown, and San Francisco is a focal point for Yang’s electoral campaigns. (photo by Kent Chuang)
Andrew Yang and his wife Evelyn with their two sons. (courtesy of Andrew Yang’s campaign team)