Andrew Yang, Democratic candidate for President of the United States in 2020, says there is good news and there is bad news. Which do you want first?
The bad news? OK, the bad news is that we face a devastating meltdown of our economy and society in the next 5 to 15 years due to a coming tsunami of automation. The good news is that Andrew Yang has a practical plan to weather this storm that pits Universal Basic Income (UBI) "for starters" and other innovations against this onslaught.
The starting point of this discussion is the understanding that millions of American truck drivers will be replaced by self-driving trucks in the next 5 to 10 years. This is happening! And this is only the largest single identifiable group, just a minority of all the workers who will be affected by this "great transformation" of automated technology. But wait! Remember, there is good news here. There is something we can do, says Andrew Yang.
Regarding UBI, here is an extensive transcription I made from the end of the Sam Harris Waking Up podcast, episode #130, from June 18th, in his interview with Andrew Yang (highly recommended).
The bad news? OK, the bad news is that we face a devastating meltdown of our economy and society in the next 5 to 15 years due to a coming tsunami of automation. The good news is that Andrew Yang has a practical plan to weather this storm that pits Universal Basic Income (UBI) "for starters" and other innovations against this onslaught.
The starting point of this discussion is the understanding that millions of American truck drivers will be replaced by self-driving trucks in the next 5 to 10 years. This is happening! And this is only the largest single identifiable group, just a minority of all the workers who will be affected by this "great transformation" of automated technology. But wait! Remember, there is good news here. There is something we can do, says Andrew Yang.
Regarding UBI, here is an extensive transcription I made from the end of the Sam Harris Waking Up podcast, episode #130, from June 18th, in his interview with Andrew Yang (highly recommended).
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| "Humanity First" - image from Yang2020.com, "What is UBI?" |
“Universal Basic Income in a democracy is something that we can make happen. Most people regard it as a fantasy, as something that’s too good to be true, ignoring the fact that it was conventional political wisdom not that long ago. In 1971 it passed the House [of Representatives].
We are going through the greatest technological and economic shift in human history and we need to get our heads out of our asses and address it. There’s a freaking elephant in the room that’s tearing the place apart and everyone’s pretending it’s not there.
We actually can solve these problems. We can build a better society for ourselves that involves valuing ourselves and our time in a way that’s independent of the market. We can build a new tech economy. We need new types of measurements around the economy that actually tell us how we’re doing, like median income, mental health and freedom from substance abuse, childhood success rates, proportion of elderly in quality situations, environmental quality.
We need to build this economy and we don’t have much time.
Let’s say hypothetically, McKinsey comes out with a report saying 30% of our jobs are subject to automation by 2030, which is twelve years from now, Bain comes out with the same report, saying 20% to 25%, calling it the “great transformation” that’s going to be 4 times faster than the Industrial Revolution, which itself caused mass riots and unrest. The president of MIT comes out and says the job of MIT now is to help prepare our society for the transition.
All of those things actually happened! All of those things are real. It’s just [that] our media is out to lunch, tracking down our idiot President’s tweet of the day. It’s insane!
All of those things actually happened! All of those things are real. It’s just [that] our media is out to lunch, tracking down our idiot President’s tweet of the day. It’s insane!
So if you actually start looking at what’s happening in real life… I mean, the reason why Trump is our president today is because we automated away 4 million jobs in the swing states. Why isn’t that the main topic of conversation? And the Democrats are running around trying to figure out what to do about that, and I’ll tell them exactly what we are going to do about it. We’re going to impose a Freedom Dividend, and give everyone $1000 a month for starters, and then we’re going to build a new kind of economy that people can participate in, independent of their region and their skill level. That’s a generational project, it’s going to be massively challenging. But the alternative is the unthinkable. The alternative is to witness the disintegration of our society in the coming years, and we are there! We are on the cusp. This country is being torn apart by a struggle between abundance and scarcity, reason and unreason, and functioning and dysfunction, and I have to say, unreason, dysfunction, scarcity, they’re all winning.
59% of Americans cannot afford an unexpected $500 bill. They’re just stepping from week to week and paycheck to paycheck, lurching toward an uncertain future. And so expecting them to be politically functional just isn’t realistic. The way we’re going to reverse that is we’re going to secure their future. And then we can fix our political discourse, invigorate our government and state, and start solving the real problems. So that’s the challenge, that’s the revolution. That’s what I’m trying to lead.
When you think it all through, we don’t have a choice.”
- Andrew Yang, Democratic candidate for President of the United Stated, 2020, transcription by Dave Gude from the Waking Up podcast by Sam Harris, episode #130, “Universal Basic Income”, June 18, 2018. Learn more about Andrew Yang's campaign at yang2020.com.
