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

by Andrew Yang

The Obama White House published a report in December 2016 that predicted 83 percent of jobs where people make less than $20 per hour will be subject to automation or replacement.

Human-Centered Capitalism,

We must make the market serve humanity rather than have humanity continue to serve the market.

America is starting 100,000 fewer businesses per year than it was only 12 years ago, and is in the midst of shedding millions of jobs due primarily to technological advances.

Educational Attainment of People (25 Years and Over) by Sex & Race (2016)

So what’s normal? The normal American did not graduate from college and doesn’t have an associate’s degree. He or she perhaps attended college for one year or graduated from high school. She or he has a net worth of approximately $36K—about $6K excluding home and vehicle equity—and lives paycheck to paycheck. She or he has less than $500 in flexible savings and minimal assets invested in the stock market. These are median statistics, with 50 percent of Americans below these levels.

The reason that even well-meaning commentators suggest increasingly unlikely and tenuous ways for people to make a living is that they are trapped in the conventional thinking that people must trade their time, energy, and labor for money as the only way to survive. You stretch for answers because, in reality, there are none. The subsistence and scarcity model is grinding more and more people up. Preserving it is the thing we must give up first.

That’s an enormously high incentive to show drivers to the door—it would actually be enough to pay the drivers their $40,000 a year salary to stay home and still save tens of billions per year.

Youngstown, Gary, and Camden are all extreme cases. It’s unlikely that their situations will be replicated in cities around the country. But they are useful as glimpses into what a future without jobs can do to a community without something dramatic filling the void.

Dr. Tom Frieden noted that “we know of no other medication routinely used for a nonfatal condition that kills patients so frequently.” A study showed that one out of every 550 patients started on opioid therapy died of opioid-related causes a median of 2.6 years after their first opioid prescription.

Contributing to the discord will be a climate that equates opposing ideas or speech to violence and hate. Righteousness can fuel abhorrent behavior, and many react with a shocking level of vitriol and contempt for conflicting viewpoints and the people who hold them.

In February 1974, Canada spent the equivalent of $56 million to get everyone in the town of Dauphin, a 13,000-person town northwest of Winnipeg, above the poverty line. One thousand families got a check each month of different amounts with no restrictions. They called it “Mincome,” short for minimum income. It lasted for four years, before a conservative government won control of the government and discontinued payments.

Of the major expenses that have shown inflation, the most conspicuous are health care costs and education costs, both of which have exploded in recent years. Health care and education are not truly subject to market forces and have thus far been resistant to both automation and increased efficiency.

The Digital Social Credit would tie together communities and give people a way to both generate value and feel valued regardless of how the market regards their time.

Adam Smith, the Scottish economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, is often regarded as the father of modern capitalism. His ideas of an invisible hand that guides the market, division of labor, and that self-interest and competition lead to wealth creation have been so deeply internalized that today we take most of them for granted.

Many countries’ form of capitalism is steered not by an unseen hand, but by clear government policy.

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.

Bill Clinton has amassed $105 million in speaking fees since leaving office.

We should give presidents a raise from their current $400,000 to $4 million tax-free per year plus 10 million Social Credits. But there would be one condition—they would not be able to accept speaking fees or any board positions for any personal gain after leaving office.

every $100 million a company is fined by the Department of Justice or bailed out by the federal government, both its CEO and its largest individual shareholder will spend one month in jail. Call the new law the Public Protection against Market Abuse Act.

A 2016 survey of American doctors by the Physicians Foundation found that 63 percent have negative feelings about the future of the medical profession, 49 percent said they often or always experience feelings of burnout, and 49 percent would not recommend a career in medicine to their children.

In part as a result of this system, there’s a national shortage of both primary care doctors and doctors who practice in rural areas. About 65 million Americans live in what one expert called basically “a primary care desert.

In one study, IBM’s Watson made the same recommendation as human doctors did in 99 percent of 1,000 medical cases and made suggestions human doctors

Our fixation on college readiness leads our high school curricula toward purely academic subjects and away from life skills. The purpose of education should be to enable a citizen to live a good, positive, socially productive life independent of work.

college tuition has risen at several times the rate of inflation the past 20 years, more dramatically than all other costs, including health care.

An analysis of a university system in California showed a 221 percent increase in administrators over a multiyear period

One way to change this would be a law stipulating that any private university with an endowment over $5 billion will lose its tax-exempt status unless it spends its full endowment income from the previous year on direct educational expenses, student support, or domestic expansion.