FORWARD

by Andrew Yang

There is something deeply wrong when working-class Americans have that response to a major party that theoretically is supposed to be fighting for them. So you have to ask yourself, “What has the Democratic Party been standing for in their minds?” And in their minds, the Democratic Party unfortunately has taken on this role of the urban, coastal elites who are more concerned about policing various cultural issues than improving their way of life that has been declining for years…This to me is a fundamental problem for the Democratic Party because if they don’t figure this out, then polarization and division will get worse, not better.

their way of life has been disintegrating for years, and if we don’t address that, you’re going to see a continued acceleration toward the institutional mistrust that animated the Trump vote and will continue to do so.”

David Shor, a Democratic polling and data expert who worked on the Obama campaign, told Politico, “We have an election system that makes it basically impossible for Democrats’ current coalition to ever wield legislative power…We are legitimately in a position from here on out where [Democrats] would need to get 54 percent of the popular vote—which we did not even accomplish this time—for multiple cycles in a row, for us to be in a position to really pass laws.”

But the data shows that two-thirds of our kids’ educational outcomes are determined by many factors outside the school: number of words read to the child when they’re young, parental income, parental time spent with the child, stress levels in the house, quality of neighborhood, and so on.

I call this dynamic constructive institutionalism—a tendency among leaders to state publicly and even hold the belief that everything will work out, despite quantitative evidence to the contrary, coupled with an inability to actually address a given institution’s real problems.

Politicians are increasingly reduced to well-liked or poll-tested stewards who tend to our emotions rather than figures who can actually improve the situation. There’s a negation of the self: you are not a human being; you are our weathervane and expresser of grief, outrage, celebration, sorrow, sports allegiance, or whatever the occasion warrants. You can’t actually amend the institution that you represent, but you can make us feel better about it temporarily as we go home.

We must start distinguishing between compassionate and conformist statements, on the one hand, and actually improving the facts on the ground in a world where action and statement have become the same, in part because very few are capable of actually taking steps that would improve the reality on the ground. The previous sentence was constructively institutionalist. You see how it works. Or doesn’t.

Even the inventor of GDP, Simon Kuznets, said at its invention in 1934 that it was a terrible measure of national well-being and cautioned against using it as such, and here we are riding it into the ground eighty-seven years later.

Bobby Kennedy famously echoed this idea, saying that GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play…[I]t measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” We’re like a car spinning our wheels in mud while the driver argues everything is okay because the eighty-seven-year-old speedometer is showing progress.

Mental health issues at work alone put a $550 billion drag on the economy.

This feels counterproductive. Trying to argue against GPd , by highlighting impact on GPD? Woulf imagine net effect is gains outweight drag

It would simply take the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Department of Commerce to start reporting economic data that included measurements of well-being and human progress.

Isnt this aready being reported by UN agencies? What is difference?

It turns out we had it all along if we decided to treat ourselves as owners and stakeholders of our own society.

Not really true

If we get it right,

Instithtional complacency or whatever e called it

The first is practical: repealing Citizens United requires a constitutional amendment, which requires a supermajority.

Maine has a robust system of publicly funding state candidates who gather $5 donations and then eschew further private funding. And Seattle in 2016 approved four $25 democracy vouchers that voters could use on local candidates who abide by spending limits.

Arent the spending limits a problem?

As we learned in part 2, more than 80 percent of congressional districts are considered “safe” seats; they are either clearly Republican or clearly Democratic. This is one reason the incumbent reelection rate is so high. It is also one reason why many of our representatives tend toward extremes: they are more worried about being challenged in the primaries than in the general election.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos,

Look up, mentioned recurrently

Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter

Look up works

California and Washington have already implemented top-two open primaries, in which the top-two finishers advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation. In some districts that means the top-two candidates from the same party—generally Democrats—run against each other in the general. California made this change in 2012, and the results have been compelling.

Why would this matter in California? Expound

Ranked-choice voting is simple: you rank the candidates in order of preference, 1 through 5. You do not have to rank them all: if you like only two candidates, you can just make a first and a second choice. If a candidate gets more than 50 percent as voters’ first choice, that candidate wins. That makes sense; anyone who gets more than 50 percent would win under any system. If no one breaks 50 percent, then the least popular candidate—the one who got the fewest 1s—is discarded, and that candidate’s voters get reassigned to their second choice. You continue this process until a candidate gets over 50 percent, and that candidate is the winner.

The winner has to get 50 percent—something that doesn’t always happen with plurality voting if you have more than two candidates (for example, Governor LePage in Maine in 2014, Bill Clinton in 1992).

This is the key

In twenty-four states, it can be enacted via ballot initiative, which allows one to get a proposition in front of voters by gathering signatures—more on this later.

Ranked choice voting

To me, the counterarguments are unpersuasive, particularly if what is proposed is eighteen-year terms each in the House and the Senate. If someone is phenomenal from a particular state, they could have up to thirty-six years representing their constituents. There is no learning curve that takes more than ten years; surgeons get trained in less time.

I have a plan too for how we can implement it:

Does it involve a new Supreme Court?

Paying legislators enough to free them from influence and the need to take a high-paying job afterward would likely reduce corruption and be the best investment we ever made.

Could it also influence people to do it just for the money?

The main lever that we can access without Congress is to get ranked-choice voting and open primaries in states across the country. As I’ve said, this, to me, is the skeleton key that could unlock our government from stasis and engender meaningful reform. You don’t need Congress; you just need motivated people in states around the country to activate this process change that would strengthen and enliven our democracy.

C-SPAN seems stuck in a time capsule from a kinder, gentler era. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard legal scholar, writes of a time when Americans all watched the same thing on broadcast television and it brought us together. Throughout the 1970s, networks would compete for sixty to seventy million viewers on any given night; that’s more than the number of Americans who watch the Super Bowl today when adjusted for population. Every night was Super Bowl Sunday. The scholars Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro called this period the “rational public” era, which stretched from about 1940 to 1990, when public attitudes were driven by relatively uniform information. Not everyone agreed, but everyone had a basic agreement on what the news was. It was presented as an objective reality—like a congressional hearing with a minimum of commentary.

“Oh no. Journalism can’t be publicly funded. Journalism is all about speaking ‘truth to power.’ If it’s funded by the government, it will lead to Orwellian totalitarianism.” I get the objection. But we are in an era where we are going to need our government to address some fundamental needs. The choice is to tackle this together or just give up. Nonprofits and volunteers are not going to replace $20 billion in lost annual revenue among local news providers. Either we find a way to provide local journalism publicly or it dies.

It was mainly funded by the federal government during the 1970s, but that has shifted to less than 4 percent of its support today. Today, NPR generates more than $200 million in annual revenue from station dues, corporate sponsorships, individual contributions, and distributions from its endowment. It has an endowment of $258 million, largely due to a $235 million gift in 2003 from Joan Kroc of the McDonald’s fortune.

NPR and PBS consistently rank among the most trusted news outlets.

Media ownership is changing whether the public likes it or not; it is better to understand and address it than to pretend that nothing has changed.

They also recommend that the IRS define public service journalism as a viable tax-deductible nonprofit activity and allow newspaper chains to divest local newspapers into locally owned nonprofits or public benefit corporations in return for enhanced tax benefits.

This makes sense

local journalism is no longer viable as a for-profit business in most communities and its survival requires a hastened evolution to a combination of public support, philanthropy, and community support.

The problem is that it doesn’t have advertisements.

It podcasts do have ads. What is the disconnect?

We are allowing billion- and trillion-dollar social media platforms to operate as black boxes because of a twenty-five-year-old provision in a law that was written before the modern internet existed. It’s patently ridiculous. Meaningful amendment affords us an enormous opportunity to curb some of the worst abuses.

The Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the early days of their company, wrote that “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They were right and could easily have written the same about social media companies.

Michael Grunwald wrote in Politico in 2020, “There is a line of thinking that America has entered a kind of postmodern political era where the appearance of governing is just as politically powerful as actual governing, because most Americans now live in partisan spin bubbles that insulate them from facts on the ground.”

Value statements and virtue signaling have assumed the role of laws and policy for many in the day-to-day back-and-forth of cable

Neither side can pass laws, so we are reduced to warring languages and symbols.

POLITICAL STRESS IS at an all-time high. We are at pre–Civil War levels of animosity, according to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, and Jack Goldstone, a sociologist at George Mason University, who study sources of unrest and political conflict. They developed a statistic—the political stress index—that incorporates income and wealth inequality, wage stagnation, national debt, competition between elites, distrust in government, social mobility, tax rates, urban density, demographics, and other factors that lead to instability and conflict.

It’s all economics. It’s all about the money

Wow. Dig into this

According to Haidt’s research, genetics determines between one-third and one-half of political differences in a group, more than the politics of the household we are raised in. In a country where there are only two major choices, we are essentially born either Democratic leaning or Republican leaning.

This also means that I’m unlikely to persuade you to switch sides by making you aware of a particular piece of information.

It turns out there is a weak relationship between how much a person identifies as a conservative or liberal and how conservative or liberal their views actually are; in both cases it’s about a 0.25 correlation, which is a lot lower than the perfect correlation many of us imagine. One reason policy is not the true driver of political disagreement is most people don’t have very strong views about policy unless they have been pushed to do so. We are operating in groups, not in policy white papers. This strikes me as a real blind spot for many progressives.

Yes! How have I never heard of this before??

Reversing these declines should be the point of public service and the purpose of politics, policy, and government.

The conservative concern. Sounds like lots of big government, intervention if not designed properly

While campaigning for president, I pledged to use a PowerPoint deck during my State of the Union to report how we are doing instead of the strange theater performance we are currently subject to. Imagine the head of a business walking in to update his or her people without any numbers or baselines to measure improvements or declines.

Like the idea behind this. Metrics based

Governing based on facts—and having those facts recognized by all parties—might just bring us back.

Data, not facts. Fake news, is too political a word

Other advanced countries have already taken the step of having many people’s taxes automatically filled out. Taxes are a perfect candidate for automation and artificial intelligence because there are clear rules to follow. We can use technology to simplify all of our lives and focus on more important things.

This is a big one. Would make tax policy data far simpler and transparent as well

Would I actually authorize private-sector-assisted tax collection if I had the power to do so? I would, at a minimum, signal to people that we were looking at implementing it two years from now and declare a tax holiday the next year so that people could check their books. I have the feeling even this would spur billions in extra revenue and maybe make people more receptive to increasing the resources of the IRS.

He also said that when they tried to hire ten new people for the USDS, they received more than a thousand applications, which suggests that his desire for greater purpose and meaning in work among technologists is a widespread feeling.