Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America

by Andrew Yang

Yet, as Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and others have pointed out, remarkable careers are unlikely to advance in a straightforward, linear fashion.1 They are more likely to contain breakout opportunities that lead to unusually rapid gains (and, of course, relative dips and plateaus). We need smart and hardworking people to build businesses around the country as much as or more than we need them to do anything else. We need more intelligent risk takers and value creators who see their communities reflected in the work they do. We need to restore the culture of achievement to include value creation, risk and reward, and the common good so that more of our top people are in position to create new enterprises and opportunities. If we succeed in this, our best and brightest will build the engines of future economic growth. If we don’t, our talent will continue to heed purely market-based incentives, our economy will likely continue to underperform, and our culture will become more and more bifurcated. I just had a son. I’d like him to be very well educated. But I don’t want him to necessarily enter a parallel universe where everyone is smart, well paid, and well dressed while the rest of the country wonders where the jobs went. This is easy to say, but very hard to achieve. People like Cole have every factor turning them toward their current choices; they’re heavily recruited and offered money, prestige, training, a network, community, and opened doors. Expecting peopl...