The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

by Andrew Yang

You know what’s really expensive? Dysfunction. Revolution.

Setting a Freedom Dividend of $12,000 a year would enable one to barely scrape by. Anyone who wants to accomplish anything, buy something nice, or build a better life for their children will still have to work.

Twelve thousand dollars a year is the equivalent of having $300,000 in savings and then living off the passive income at 4 percent a year.

If the universal basic income were paid for through a VAT as proposed above, we wouldn’t be increasing the money supply, so inflation wouldn’t be expected based on the amount of money floating around.

If you reflect on your own costs, most things that are subject to economic competition, globalization, and technology have gotten either much cheaper or much better or both. I

The data doesn’t show this. In every basic income study, there has been no increase in drug and alcohol use.

But it’s not like a lack of money is presently keeping people from using opioids and alcohol—they find a way to get both money and drugs right now, sometimes illicitly. A UBI would curb antisocial behaviors and give at least some an increased ability to seek treatment.

The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth.

The Peace Corps’s annual budget of $410 million is $56,000 per volunteer.

The Peace Corps has over 1,000 full-time employees supporting 7,200 volunteers, for example.

government-financed positions need to be created very carefully and judiciously and preferably focused on high-impact roles. They certainly will not be the cure for a nation without enough jobs to go around.

Dutch professor Robert J. van der Veen and economist Philippe van Parijs observed that a UBI will bring down the average wage rate for attractive, intrinsically rewarding work.

Human Capitalism would have a few core tenets: 1. Humanity is more important than money. 2. The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar. 3. Markets exist to serve our common goals and values.

There’s a saying in business that “what gets measured gets managed for.”

In addition to GDP and job statistics, the government should adopt measurements such as: • Median income and standard of living • Levels of engagement with work and labor participation rate • Health-adjusted life expectancy • Childhood success rates • Infant mortality • Surveys of national well-being • Average physical fitness and mental health • Quality of infrastructure • Proportion of elderly in quality care • Human capital development and access to education • Marriage rates and success • Deaths of despair/despair index/substance abuse • National optimism/mindset of abundance

Community integrity and social capital • Environmental quality • Global temperature variance and sea levels • Reacclimation of incarcerated individuals and rates of criminality • Artistic and cultural vibrancy • Design and aesthetics • Information integrity/journalism • Dynamism and mobility • Social and economic equity • Public safety • Civic engagement • Cybersecurity • Economic competitiveness and growth • Responsiveness and evolution of government • Efficient use of resources

at USAFacts.org

We used to joke around as the months wore on that “health care is where good ideas go to die.”

The system rewards activity and output over health improvements and outcomes.

of the farmers and peasants walking around would be capable of learning to read, they’d scoff and say, ‘Read? Most of these peasants could never learn to do something like that.’ They might guess that 2 to 3 percent of the peasants would be capable of becoming literate. Today we know that the real number is closer to 99 percent. Virtually everyone is capable of learning to read. But if I ask you today how many people are smart enough to study quantum physics, you might say only 2 or 3 percent. This is as shortsighted as the monks were in the Middle Ages. We are just scratching the surface of how smart people can become if we give them the proper tools to learn. In the years ahead, we will find that people are capable of much more than we can imagine.”