Andrew Yang: the 2020 candidate warning of the rise of robots
Andrew Yang: the 2020 candidate warning of the rise of robots
The entrepreneur says Trump won
the 2016 election because the US automated away jobs – so he wants to become
president to do something about it
Donald Trump won 2,584 counties in the 2016 presidential
election; Hillary Clinton carried only 472. But the Democratic nominee’s
accounted for nearly two-thirds of America’s economic output, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.
This is one vivid illustration of America’s great divide.
Glittering coastal cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and
Washington are becoming richer and more influential, attracting more
jobs, better hospitals and schools, and technology. Small towns and rural
communities are falling further behind, feeding a sense that, to paraphrase LP
Hartley, the coasts are a foreign country – they do things differently there.
Andrew Yang, a New York and Silicon Valley
entrepreneur and David taking on multiple Goliaths in the Democratic race for
the White House in 2020, is here to tell you that it’s about to become much,
much worse – and that is why he is running for president.
Yang, 44, is the founder of Venture for
America, a national public service fellowship that places recent
graduates in struggling communities. “I would fly between St Louis and San
Francisco, or Michigan and Manhattan, and I would feel like I was traversing
dimensions and ways of life rather than just a couple of time zones,” he told
the Guardian in Washington this week.
“The two historical time periods that are comparable to where we
are now in terms of polarisation and division are the French Revolution before
the revolution and the United States before the civil war,” he said.
Few pundits are taking Yang’s
candidacy seriously but he certainly is, with multiple
trips to Iowa and New Hampshire so far. He has raised $250,000
from 14,000 donors in the past week. According to his campaign team, “Yang
Gang” chapters have sprung up in more than 35 states.
He has no doubts about the gravity
of his mission. Life expectancy in the US has declined for the past three years for the
first time since the flu pandemic of 1918 because of a surge in suicides and
drug overdoses, both of which are at record highs, Yang notes.
And like a time traveller from the
future, Yang has a warning about more to come: the rise of the machines –
robots that will put millions of more people out of work. As it happens, it is
an army of automatons conceived and created by tech firms on the coasts and
unleashed on middle America, potentially spurring a deepening us versus them
mentality. Yang has written: “I am writing from inside the tech bubble to let
you know that we are coming for your jobs.”
Yang wants to become president so
he can do something about it. He asserts that Trump won the election because
the country automated away 4m manufacturing jobs in the critical swing states
of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri and Iowa.
“Now we’re about to do the same
thing to millions of retail jobs, call centre jobs, fast food jobs and, most
destructively, trucking jobs in the coming years … When I talked to other
mainstream political candidates, no one seemed to want to focus on the enormity of the reality that’s ahead for America.”
Like it or not, self-driving
trucks are coming, Yang is certain. Truck driving is the most common job in 29
states in America, according to census data, and a demographic
that includes many ex-military servicemen and many Trump voters.
Yang, armed with a battery of
statistics, says: “There are 3.5 million truck drivers, 94% male, average age
49, average education high school or one year of college, and they make about
$46,000 a year. It’s one of the highest-paying jobs for non-college graduates
in the US. It’s a very demanding, punishing job, but it’s also one of the
surest ways to a middle-class income for a huge number of men.
“On the other side you have some
of the smartest engineers in the country working on automating away that job.
The financial incentives to do so are massive: $168bn a year in estimated
savings, not just from labour costs but equipment utilisation, fuel efficiency,
fewer accidents. So if you foresee that the truck driving jobs are going to
start getting automated away in the next five to 10 years, that’s going to have
massive ramifications not just for this 3.5m trucker population but also the 5
million-plus Americans who work in truck stops, motels and diners that rely
upon the truckers stopping every day.
He goes on: “So the hollowing out
of the interior of the country is going to be amplified many times over by the
automation of freight. I was just in Davenport, Iowa, at the country’s largest
truck stop, Iowa 80, and they proudly state that 5,000 people stop
there every day. So you can imagine what’s going to happen when that number
starts to dwindle. It’s going to be disastrous for many Americans and many
communities.”
In an age when many are tired of
celebrity politics, no one could accuse Yang of lacking big ideas. Under his
administration, the government would provide a universal basic
income of $1,000 a month, or $12,000 a year, for all US
citizens between the ages of 18 and 64, paid for by a new tax on automation.
Before you suggest he is mad, Yang contends that Thomas Paine, Martin Luther
King, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman all endorsed similar ideas, and
oil-rich Alaska has paid an annual dividend to citizens for the past 37 years with great success.
“If you put $1,000 a month into
people’s hands it gets their heads up and it helps children become healthier
and stronger and graduate from school at higher rates,” he said. “It makes
people mentally healthier and improves relationships, it would reduce domestic
violence and hospital visits, it would help empower women to improve their
situations if they are in exploitative or abusive jobs or relationships.”
The question, naturally, is how are you going to pay for it?
Yangs wants a change in the tax code so that tech giants such as Amazon and Google
pay a value added tax, generating hundreds of billions of dollars. He also
believes that it would pump money back into the economy, for example in the
form of tutoring and food for children, car repairs, trips to the hardware
store, the occasional night out, and create 2m jobs.
“This is the trickle-up economy
from people, families and communities. It would actually work, unlike the
trickle-down economy which was sold to us,” he said.
Yang was born in Schenectady, New
York, the son of Taiwanese immigrants; his father generated 69 US patents for
GE and IBM over his career. “I’m very proud of being Asian American and there
are many Asian Americans who are excited about my candidacy,” he said.
Yang is fond of referring to “the
numbers”. Dispute them at your peril. He tweeted this week: “Sometimes a
journalist will say to me: ‘You’re polling at 1%’ as if it’s a bad thing. I
respond: ‘That’s right. And that’s when most Americans have never heard of me.
We are only going to grow from here.’”
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