I've said some skeptical shit about UBI. I've said some skeptical shit about Andrew Yang. Mea culpa. My mind has been changed. Let's get that out of the way first.
let's also address the subtitle of the book: "The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future". It's a useful framing device because about half of that phrase is about america's disappearing jobs" and about half of it is about UBI. I'd say 2/3rds of this book is about why "normal people" are fucked by automation, which is important, because there isn't a source quoted in this book that I haven't read. There isn't a graph I was unfamiliar with, there isn't a statistic I couldn't personally source if necessary to clobber a libertarian in an internet debate. Thus, GMA is at zero: having read the exact same material as me, Andrew Yang drew the exact same conclusions. At that point, I personally can't dispute his findings. I mean, I've basically written the first three quarters of this book in various comments on Hubski. I even dragged the Alaska Permanent Fund into it at some point, but didn't go on to discover that wealth inequality is lower in Alaska than any other state in the nation, or that it has been an overwhelming good.
Which, credit where credit is due, Yang saw the bleakness and came up with a plan to deal with it. Yang has a lot of plans, which is interesting to note because this is not a long book. It isn't wonkish at all, and spends very little time in the weeds. Of course, if you would like more detail such detail is readily available which is telling but we'll get to that in a minute.
It's worth noting that Yang uses the phrase "universal basic income" very sparingly in this book. Nor does he use the preferred campaign language of "freedom dividend." He does point out that Nixon was on the ragged edge of UBI, Martin Luther King was big into UBI and that Iran has UBI. And he does so after pointing out that "means tested" basic income is an utter bust (example: my neighbors, who could certainly do some work but don't because the minute you're caught earning any money on disability you'll never get it again) without ever writing the phrase "means tested."
This is an opinion, but I believe slogans should be immediately obvious. This is, in my opinion, the problem wypepo have with the phrase "defund the police." It requires explanation. "Disarm the police?" That one's obvious. "Demilitarize the police?" equally obvious. Black Lives Matter chose language that spoke to those who already have affinity for them, not those who were on the fence. When Yang started making a run at politics he went with "universal basic income" because that's what the techie nerds like, and techie nerds are who he was closest to. When he became a presidential candidate he went with "freedom dividend" because it raised his profile among rednecks.
But I think we'll see him again, and I think he'll call it "Social Security For All."
Andrew Yang's vision for "universal basic income" isn't enough money to support you, it's enough money that nobody starves. The number he uses over and over is $1200 a month. He arrives at this number because of a friend of his with Lyme disease who gets that much for disability. I, too, have a friend with Lyme who has to hide any actual work he does from legit investigators because, dammit, once we've decided you're disabled you're not allowed to have a good day. You're not allowed to earn some money when you don't feel like shit. You are a permanent underclass (a phrase Yang does use a few times), forever thrown into the twilight of society. $1258 a month is the average disability payout in the United States in 2020.
Yang also makes hay with the statistic that 70% of the time young men would spend in employment is replaced with video gaming, as well as the fact that there are more people under 30 living with their parents than with their partners. Video games have achievement, socialization and zero cost while moving out and living with a girl means economic failure. And she won't have you anyway as 2/3rds of college degrees now go to women and 2/3rds of the jobs destroyed in the last recession were traditionally male occupations.
So what Yang proposes, basically, is an economic safety net that is automatically and immediately available to every single human being in the United States. At least, I presume so as he never talks about immigration at all. He argues this is a net benefit because it lowers the barrier to entry for jobs people take out of affinity or altruism (art, volunteering) while reducing the risk for entrepreneurialism. His examples are a soup kitchen with four employees that can suddenly afford to hire seven by dropping their salaries, since the government is picking up a chunk of those employees' living expenses and a coffee shop that suddenly becomes much less risky because donuts are simultaneously less expensive to the town since everyone is getting a little extra money and less intensive for the owner since their profits don't need to provide 100% of the owner's living expenses.
the idea, basically, is that automation is already destroying everyone's employment and radically enriching the Exeter class so you might as well tax the shit out of wealth and redistribute it enough that the people who have been assed out of sheet metal bending can get by with their Etsy store. He doesn't envision a golden renaissance of friendship bead galleries on the Internet, he envisions a slightly-less-Dickensian existence for everyone whose job has been axed by AI and yellow robots.
And I see his point. Take our burgeoning dystopia from yesterday.
Amazon workers make about $34k a year to be ground to dust for our convenience. The people who work there can basically choose between Bezos sucking out their life force or a life under an overpass. Let's raise the floor to $14k a year, though - on the one hand, you're now living off $50k a year to be ground in Amazon's gears, which makes it suck less. But you're only taking a $20k hit to not take the job.
Yang's got some other ideas in here that aren't particularly surprising; medicare for all, criminal corporate reform, salaried doctors, taxation of university endowments. He spends a lot of time on "social credits" in a very non-PRC way: Yang sees social credits as "useless internet points" that you get for helping out your neighborhood or city on a centralized favor exchange platform whereby your useless internet points can be exchanged and banked and donated and bought by corporations, as well as granted by the government. Importantly, Yang's social credit never goes negative, thereby making it an incentive rather than a mechanism of punishment. Of course you could obviously restrict voting to people with a lifetime social credit of 5000 or some other dystopian shit but it's an interesting idea.
All in all? The fundamental basis of this book is "the government needs to take better care of the people because reasons, here are solutions." For a political manifesto from a tech wonk it's surprisingly human in a nearly Elizabeth Warren-esque way. Again, I don't think that's by accident. I think this was a book written for people who read and review books. The stuff on his website is written for people who read websites. His debate performances were scripted for people who watch debates. His news availabilities have been scripted for people who watch the news and his podcast appearances are for people who listen to podcasts.
ahosai and I talked about this briefly. He said he hated politicians because everything they say is obviously scripted and nothing ever sounds honest. I pointed out that Howard Dean sounded honest. More than that, I think there's a big difference between policy and politics. And I think Andrew Yang reached the point where he realized his policies would never go further without engaging in politics.
I still don't think he wanted to be president in 2020. I think he's got a much better grasp of the kabuki than I was giving him credit for. I think he ran for president in order to increase his access to other policy people. I think he's building a coalition for 2028.
I'll certainly be watching.
Nice review--thanks, as always! Just to flesh out a couple points (since he was the single politician I paid any attention to, so I heard a number of long interviews he gave):
- So what Yang proposes, basically, is an economic safety net that is automatically and immediately available to every single human being in the United States. At least, I presume so as he never talks about immigration at all.
His policy proposal was actually limited to US citizens 18 and over. When asked about it, he gave one of his worst answers I heard him give to any question, which was basically "mumble, mumble, fairness." It was obvious that he thought that every legal permanent resident in America should be eligible, but that his political staff convinced him to say "citizens" for the same reason you cite that changed to "freedom dividend". Personally, "freedom" aside, I think calling it a dividend is not just smart but semantically correct, if you believe we're all shareholders in America (a la popular sovereignty) and therefore should have some reward when America experiences a profit glut as we have for decades now.
Second:
- I still don't think he wanted to be president in 2020. I think he's got a much better grasp of the kabuki than I was giving him credit for. I think he ran for president in order to increase his access to other policy people. I think he's building a coalition for 2028.
He was the only candidate I've ever heard say "yes" when asked if he would accept a VP or a cabinet position were he not elected the nominee. The standard line is always supposed to be, "I'm focused on this race." He was very willing to all but admit that he was campaigning for secretary of something (treasury? labor? some new cabinet department?). I really respected that answer, because it was so honest.
I also really appreciated the fact he almost always answered the question that was asked of him and did so as completely as he could, which is another non-politician move--no pivoting to the message you want to get out. I think the moment I became a Yang convert was when he cited the stat that more people are currently on disability than are actively looking for jobs (obviously not true anymore! but it will be again soon), then went on to try to say something smart about how to address that. He also wants to vastly reorganize the way we collect taxes, which to me is a game changer. I hope he's around a while. I very much regret not getting a chance to vote for him.
- It was obvious that he thought that every legal permanent resident in America should be eligible, but that his political staff convinced him to say "citizens" for the same reason you cite that changed to "freedom dividend".
I guarantee you there were multiple people on the staff who said, correctly, something along the lines of "dude if you don't limit this to citizens we'll spend the rest of your campaign fighting skirmishes over guest worker programs and we'll never be able to talk about anything else ever again." I don't see how you could really begin to grapple with UBI/SSA4All/whatever until you'd revamped immigration. And I don't think Andrew Yang has many strong opinions about immigration.
- Personally, "freedom" aside, I think calling it a dividend is not just smart but semantically correct,
I think you grab the low-hanging Obamacare. "Dividend" is a painfully wonky word that nobody poor is going to understand. Meanwhile I have a buddy who is doing his level best to stay above water until he can start collecting social security. Sure, it's a "dividend" but it's also "security" in that it can't be fucking taken away. As it is now, we provide "security" to the employment underclass on the threat that they fucking well better never try entering the workforce ever fucking again, which is the dumbest possible strategy. Dividends? Those vary from year to year and you might not get one. "Social Security?" We've got six generations of grandparents who have made that work.
- I think the moment I became a Yang convert was when he cited the stat that more people are currently on disability than are actively looking for jobs (obviously not true anymore! but it will be again soon), then went on to try to say something smart about how to address that.
In the book, he states that there are more people collecting disability than work in construction.
- I'm just praying that introducing a basic income doesn't lead to a lot of disenfranchised young people playing video games.
This is exactly the reason Yang endorsed social credit, which was treated by the right exactly as you'd expect, so he called it "modern time banking."
He's got an example in his book of an out-of-work trucker in a trailer park in Kansas who doesn't see his son enough and doesn't get along with his ex-wife and spends most of his days watching television until his phone notifies him that there's a widow six blocks away who needs her propane tank changed for 125 DSCs so he wanders over at 1pm and helps out a nice old lady and ends up wandering around the trailer park doing in-person mechanical turk stuff so that he can get some savings on a tent at Cabela's and borrow someone's dog for the weekend 'cuz his son likes dogs.
Type "American Social Credit" into the googles and you can see exactly how deeply China's system has poisoned the phrase; Yang, however, makes the point that people will jump through inordinate hoops to be the mayor of an IHOP on foursquare or qualify as a Google Local Guide or get some meaningless Yelp streak and it's exceptionally fucking stupid for predatory corporations to jump on gamification and the government to act like it's above it. Yang even points out a handful of municipalities in the US that are doing it but good f'n luck finding that stuff now.
Before I even begin, kleinbl00, your Amazon story that you link. You ask the question "What company is best leveraged to bring back The Company Store Business Model in the next decade or so" and I think that article is the start of it. I thought private buses for Google, Apple, etc. was bad.
You know, nil, I agree with you whole heartedly in spirit here. I remember a really good picnic I went to a few years back, where I met a very wonderful lady who happened to be a social worker, and one of her main jobs was helping people recovering from substance abuse find volunteer work. It was super helpful for them for a variety of reasons, from the regular routine helping to keep them fall off the wagon, to building marketable skills and good habits for reliability, to, and this part is most important, building a sense of self confidence and worth.
That said, I'm so inline with what you said that I don't have much to add, other than I think it's socially criminal that employers are doing what they can to disempower the workforce. Good, meaningful work really does so much to lift the spirit and everything from depressing wages to creating hostile/unsafe/depressing workplaces gets in the way of that.
- "I'm just praying that introducing a basic income doesn't lead to a lot of disenfranchised young people playing video games."
Why is that a problem?
People's motivations and mentality change throughout their life. Understanding that there may be a lull of 3 years where someone is "just playing video games", and being OK with that is just being an empathetic human.
They'll get tired of the game. They'll get tired of the same grind every day. They get tired of eating the same thing. They get tired of not having any goals. Things change. Our mentality goes through phases throughout our life, and we grow/evolve despite ourselves.
Would you rather that person be a surly server at a restaurant, who doesn't want to be there, who only wants to be home playing games, and provides you with a terrible experience? And a manager with a terrible employee. And other employees being affected by the one person's bad attitude?
Why NOT let them take advantage of the social safety net? To pursue their own personal development, or go to a professional that can help them get beyond their current malaise? AND be able to seek the help they need without the anxiety of having to hold down their job at the same time, find therapist appointments outside of their (variable) work schedule and traffic jam times, etc.?
The customer at the fast food restaurant has a better experience, because the employee they interact with is there by choice.
The manager and other employees at the restaurant have a better work environment and crew, and actually enjoy their work, rather than HAVING to do it just to survive.
The game company makes money.
The therapist makes money.
The food delivery company makes money.
And, in the end, the individual gets to be the architect of their own rise from the ashes. They get to feel a sense of accomplishment at overcoming their personal demon, rather than doing all the work just to get to neutral/zero/level again.
Any demonization of people for USING their UBI is seriously stick-in-the-mud thinking... if I had UBI today, I'd cut my hours to 20 hours per week (because that's all the work I honestly have) and spend the rest of the time working on a sliding scale doing marketing projects for small businesses I love, but who can't afford to give me $100k/year.
The idea of UBI is so mind-bending to Americans... we just can't even wrap our heads around what life would be like if we had ANY flexibility in our work at all...
- It's a problem because gaming can be a very insular community and highly addictive.
I think my issue is your focus on gaming. The exact same thing can be said for Mormons, or bow hunters, or Japanese high performance auto tuners, or pinstripers, or knitters, or writers.
Your particular dislike for gaming (which you come by naturally due to your brother's experience), clouds what UBI would do for other people who laser focus on whatever their passion is.
UBI would allow each of them to pursue the thing that they are most passionate about. A dedicated writer, working on their book, might get a job for 10 hours a week to supplement their UBI, and then spend 20 hours a day, locked in their room typing up their magnum opus. They would be perfectly happy to send off their manuscript via email to their editor, do all the editing and rewriting virtually, and never have to do a book tour - or leave their house - again.
It's not about gaming/gamers. It's about where people WANT to spend their time and purse the thing they are passionate about.
Will some people become shut-ins? Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. They do that today... UBI wouldn't change their core tendencies.
And with a proper social/medical system in place to support people with clinical problems, UBI allows them to get the help they need, if the reason for their cloistered existence is a mental issue rather than a simple preference.
There is definitely a balance between "I am comfortable never working" and "I am uncomfortable never working." There needs to be something appealing about working, and there needs to be something unappealing about not working.
Balance in the United States is definitely skewed towards maximum (fatal) discomfort for not working. The real argument is that moving forward, the incentives for working won't go away but the opportunities will - so the tech college job keeping your brother out of LoL is much less likely to be available, and much more likely to be taken by people who want it more.
There is already a massive group of mostly-men who play video games rather than contributing to society. That group is likely to grow. An entrepreneurial sort would figure out a way to tap that resource in such a way that you can profit off their labors because as a group, it's going to get bigger before it gets smaller, UBI or not.
- Importantly, Yang's social credit never goes negative, thereby making it an incentive rather than a mechanism of punishment. Of course you could obviously restrict voting to people with a lifetime social credit of 5000 or some other dystopian shit but it's an interesting idea.
Have you read Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom? This reminds me of Whuffie.
I harbor a slow-developing theory that we are headed towards a post-money society, because money is an inefficient and game-able proxy for value. The technology isn't there yet, but the need is. I see trust-less digital scarcity as one necessary step towards this reality.
I suspect that we will move through an uncomfortable phase of centralized social credit before we can arrive at decentralized social credit, but maybe not.
I read nine-tenths of that shitty-ass book just so I could make this comment:
Yang's social credit has exactly fuckall to do with Doctorow's Whuffie because Doctorow's Whuffie is a poorly-thought-out strawman argument for esteem to replace not just money, not just commerce, but also criminal justice just so that he can make a really shitty argument about social media.
WHILE Doctorow was writing that book, ample evidence was documented in fucking Boing Boing no less that trolls liked trolls and that provocative acts earned plenty of prestige from people who liked provocative acts. Which did not prevent Doctorow from writing a shitty 1-world-government cautionary tale that didn't pay the scarcest attention to either the underpinnings nor the outcome of his system at an economic, social, geopolitical, physical or emotional level.
I'm mad at this book.
I'm mad at you for making me read this book.
I'll bet if you pinned him down he'd go with CTRL-ALT-DEL on the whole thing. Social security, disability, medicare, medicaid, all of it. I think his basic model is to accord everyone the rights of senior citizens.
I think the DNC is hoping against hope that the AOC wing of the Democratic Party gets annihilated in November so they can go back to Republican Lite. They may have to reassess when it is revealed that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are only appealing when grading on a curve.
He said as much in an interview with Dave Rubin who has a conservative audience but other times he's been evasive or contradicted that interview. As a single person I might be able to make it on $12k a year but also my roommate is on disability, food stamps and supplemental housing and dude ain't exactly making it so maybe I couldn't. Add a few kids and you're SOL
Again, the idea is to "might be able to make it" such that if you can pull in $75 a week on Taskrabbit that's an extra $300 a month. Meanwhile it didn't take you 40 hours a week to pull down $1500.
Add in a few kids and you add in a few $1200 checks. Take it from me - my little bundle of joy is hella more than $1200 a month. But a single mom with three kids is going to do better by society at $4800 a month, let alone the kids.
He's not even consistent on who gets the payment. I'm not super into arguing for things I basically support by way of political feasibility so I'm not going down that route. I support Yang insofar as he brings some interesting ideas to the fore but dude is just not anywhere near me on the political spectrum
of all the inhuman millionaire wonks out there, i would be so happy if andrew yang was the one i had to support
we can't help but stan
Mile high, if you could read between the lines on Andrew Yang, I think you'd see
Rich people and poor people alike were actually happier when there was four orders of magnitude between them. We're now at six and heading to eight. Let's shoot for five.