FORWARD

by Andrew Yang

Right now, members of Congress have a reelection rate of about 90 percent, while Congress’s approval rating hovers around 21 percent. Their incentives rest on placating the most extreme 20 percent of their constituents who actually vote in party primaries, which makes it easier to blame the other side.

His frustration at having his career limited based on what his superiors thought about him stuck with me: it was something that later made me want to be an entrepreneur.

I went away for the last two years of high school in New Hampshire, which was itself a culture shock. I met kids who had been bred from birth to be the leadership class. Their sense of confidence and entitlement was foreign to me;

I knew that great things were possible from humble beginnings if you had the right people involved.

Imagine thinking you might be able to advance human civilization. It was the biggest opportunity one could imagine.

I looked at our downsides: time away from my family, money, my reputation, a loss of privacy, and possible total humiliation. It could be that no one would listen to the magical Asian man who wanted to give everyone money. I could live with that. At least I’d be able to look at myself in the mirror and say that I stood up for what I believed was right and fought for a vision of the future I would actually be proud to leave to our children.

I’ve found the best sign that you’re going to succeed is when amazing people want to come work with you.

People don’t listen to ideas. People listen to other people.

And in Iowa only 171,517 Iowans participated in the 2016 Democratic caucuses. This was only 5.4 percent of the 3.1 million people in the state. You could assume that the number would grow somewhat in 2020, but the field would also be much more crowded. So my projection was that if I got approximately 40,000 Iowans on board I could win. (Indeed, Bernie Sanders wound up getting the most votes, with 45,652, so my working assumption was pretty close.)

This is bonkers. 40k out of a country of 300M+

I divided my priorities into three main buckets: money and organizational growth press and awareness support in the early states

Similar to Cider Association Director. 3 buckets

I was running a substantive campaign based on big ideas like universal basic income. But the campaign required attention as its oxygen, and the mainstream media would not cover ideas so much as characters. People becoming familiar with me or even saying, “I kind of like that guy,” was a necessary condition for anyone to actually engage with the campaign.

As the cable news audience ages and people’s news consumption fragments, we are likely to see more outliers from outside conventional politics making dramatic rises that would have been unthinkable not that long ago. Institutional gatekeepers will be replaced by individual opinion makers, and politics will start to veer more toward the extremes as candidates draw attention and resources directly from people. If you are a fan of moderation, you will likely see less of it as the media gatekeepers recede in prominence.

In my experience, if you see a CEO chasing press, that person’s company is probably headed for trouble. The energy spent burnishing your image could almost always be better spent managing your people, ferreting out problems, clearing obstacles, honing processes, talking to customers, selecting vendors, recruiting team members, and working on new initiatives.

In national politics, it turns out, you’re not as much the CEO as you are yourself the product.

Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has argued that this change in attitude is adaptive and meant to aid efficiency. If you become powerful, you have less need to read other people because you have command of resources. The need to demonstrate empathy is behind you.

When we asked respondents why they approved of universal basic income, it was not that it would improve their standard of living or that they were concerned about the automation of jobs. Instead, it was that they heard from me and liked me or trusted me. People want a person to pin an idea to.

By raising the profile of universal basic income and focusing on issues like automation, we had accelerated the end of poverty in our society by years, perhaps even generations.

Very EA-math line of thinking. But feels dubious in all practicality

I had achieved a level of celebrity, and the question was how best to use it.

We were able to send money to thousands of people a day by mid-April. Between March and September 2020 we sent out about $5 million to struggling American families.

Wow, impressive

Some CDC staff members were mortified when a seventeen-year-old in Seattle named Avi Schiffmann managed to compile coronavirus data faster than the agency, creating a website that scraped data in real time from various sources, attracting millions of daily visitors.

This wasn’t a lack of resources. It was a lack of responsibility, decisiveness, and fast-twitch muscle fiber. No one knew who was responsible for the tests, even after the fact.

This situation highlights one of the great sources of our collective frustration, anger, and despair in the twenty-first-century United States. Our bureaucracies are too often embarrassingly or tragically ineffective and inefficient, and generally no one is held accountable when they fail.

This situatuon = CDC Covid response

The Standish Group, an international IT research advisory firm, examined 3,555 technology rollouts in any context that had at least $10 million in labor costs from 2003 to 2012, which includes most significant government IT projects over the period. The firm found that 41.4 percent were total failures; these projects either were abandoned or had to be restarted from scratch. Fifty-two percent of the large projects were over budget, were behind schedule, or didn’t meet user expectations. Only 6.4 percent were successful.

Meanwhile, our legislators haven’t had any dedicated in-house technology policy advisers since 1995. That was the year Congress eliminated the Office of Technology Assessment, which had been founded in 1972 to give objective advice about technology and its impact. It was ostensibly abolished to save money, despite having a budget of only $22 million at the time.

Never knew this existed

Bureaucratic failures will continue to recur because many of our governing institutions aren’t built for efficiency, urgency, or accountability. They are built for continuity, stability, and the bureaucracy itself.

in 1940 the same figure was 92 percent.

Doesnt seem pples to apples , Great Depression and post-war boom

Let these rankings sink in. There are thirty countries with better access to drinking water, thirty-two with better access to quality education and lower rates of children dying, and twenty-six countries where a sixty-year-old can be expected to live longer. This is pretty basic stuff that our society is getting worse at delivering, even while our economy has boomed as measured by worker productivity and stock market valuations.

A decline in local journalism has been linked to fewer candidates running for mayor and lower turnout in state and local elections. Why vote if you don’t know what’s going on? The other effect is that more voters simply vote along partisan lines.

Context and factual data are often considered too cumbersome for the audience…A very capable senior producer once said: “Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”

The trust in media varies wildly depending on one’s political leanings: 69 percent of Democrats say they trust the media, while only 36 percent of independents and 15 percent of Republicans say the same.

Wow

In 2018, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers went through 126,000 contested stories that were distributed on Twitter, some true and some untrue. They found that a false story was much more likely to go viral; fake news was six times faster to reach fifteen hundred people than something accurate. This was the case in every subject area—business, foreign affairs, science, and technology. “It seems to be pretty clear that false information outperforms true information,” Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT data scientist who led the study, told a reporter for The Atlantic.

The dangers of social media are myriad, and yet it seems that we have little clue as to what to do about them. As Robinson Meyer put it in The Atlantic in 2018, “Social media seems to systematically amplify falsehood at the expense of the truth, and no one—neither experts nor politicians nor tech companies—knows how to reverse that trend. It is a dangerous moment for any system of government premised on a common public reality.”

Imagine a world where we are truly unable to differentiate fact from fiction, where you can show video recordings of anyone saying or doing something and they may simply deny that it happened. Nina Schick, the author of Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, suggests that this could be the end of representative democracy.

It’s difficult to imagine building a consensus when so many Americans are seeing different versions of reality right now, much less five or ten years from now.

A third ugly consequence of data harvesting is that it affects our mental health. All of the checking on old classmates, clicking, and posting makes us less happy. Social media use has been linked to a surge in anxiety, depression, and loneliness, fueled by the mechanics that maximize both engagement and data collection for the tech companies.

“Here’s the bottom line,” declared the psychology professor Melissa G. Hunt about the study’s results: “Using less social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness.

Screen time is what’s known in economic terms as an inferior good: the poorer you are, the more of it you consume.

I’d rather improve the status quo and get people some portion of the tens of billions a year being made off our data immediately and simultaneously lobby for better regulations than to just hope for the rules to change.

Some of the candidates I endorsed were people who had worked on or volunteered for my campaign.

Isn’t this kinda the same thing he was just railing against?

I consider myself a loyal person, but loyalty in politics has a way of keeping things from changing.

It turns out that defeating an incumbent is very, very difficult. Here are the reelection rates for incumbents since 1976: REELECTION RATES FOR HOUSE MEMBERS Election Year Percentage of Incumbents Reelected 2018 91% 2016 97%

The average successful House campaign raised more than $1.6 million in recent cycles. In the Senate, it was more than $10.4 million. Amanda Litman of Run for Something writes, “Generally speaking, the ‘experts’ recommend that you shouldn’t run for a seat in the House unless you can pretty quickly figure out how you’ll raise at least $300,000 from your network.” Her rule of thumb is that it costs $500,000 to $2 million to run a credible campaign for Congress.

Only about 1 percent of American adults contribute more than $200 to a campaign, and about a tenth of 1 percent give the maximum. Getting someone to donate anything to a political campaign is a real feat.

“If voters haven’t done all the research that we hope they will do before they go in, they’ll often default and go with the person whose name they recognize,” said Professor Andrew Downs at Purdue’s Center for Indiana Politics. It’s another advantage of incumbency: more voters will find the name of their current representative familiar.

Not much attention is paid to congressional politics in part because most races are not competitive across party lines. Thanks partially to gerrymandering, the common practice in which states draw congressional district boundaries that favor candidates from one party over another, more than 80 percent of congressional districts are considered safely Republican or Democrat; there is almost no chance of the other party winning.

Because the vast majority of seats are safely red or blue, the biggest threat to the incumbent is not someone from the other side; it’s that they will be challenged in the primary within their own party. This is one reason why members of Congress are pushed away from compromise; reaching across the aisle to work with the other party will increase the prospect of a viable challenger from the extreme flank of your own party.

Less than 20 percent of eligible voters participate in most congressional primaries, and this group is disproportionately ideologically extreme. Any form of compromise will be more likely to be punished than rewarded.

This is the landscape you are entering. You’re running against an incumbent with a million-dollar advantage in a media-unfriendly environment where most everyone thin...

Francis Fukuyama calls the current system a “vetocracy”: I may not be able to get something done, but I can keep you from doing anything.

The following week I watched the Republican National Convention. It was like a parallel universe. The messages were well presented and often started from something compelling and then took a different direction. The entertainment and production values were high. It reminded me of the movie Starship Troopers. An unfailingly keen observer, Evelyn watched it with me and said, “I think people will respond to this law-and-order message more than Democrats might think.”