FORWARD

by Andrew Yang

Today 55 percent of Americans agree that we should pass universal basic income.

Thinkers I admire like Katherine Gehl, Michael Porter, and Ezra Klein have made this observation: those who believe that our politics are broken are wrong. Politics is functioning exactly as our structural incentives demand. The problem is that those demands have nothing to do with improving our lives; more often than not, people get rewarded more for keeping a problem around than for solving it.

Putting people—however well-intentioned—into a corruptive system of personal and political incentives produces nothing but dysfunction and disillusionment.

Right now, members of Congress have a reelection rate of about 90 percent, while Congress’s approval rating hovers around 21 percent.

With ranked-choice voting, candidates would need to achieve majority support from all the voters in their district and not just the party primary voters.

Ranked-choice voting will be the crucial change that unlocks us from stasis and polarization.

I had first discovered universal basic income a few years earlier through thinkers like Andy Stern, Martin Ford, and Rutger Bregman.

Over time I’ve learned that they were right. People don’t listen to ideas. People listen to other people.

Instead, many members of the national media feel they have a responsibility to reinforce particular candidates and their “narratives” and dismiss others. They don’t just report on the news; they form it.

But the MSNBC flap offered another campaign trail lesson: don’t expect TV news organizations to act accountable, fair, and objective. Many don’t even see themselves that way. They’re not there to report the news; they’re there to make the news. They have set audiences to whom they are appealing and are comfortable making judgments as to what and how to present “the news” to that audience. They may not be eager to add new variables to the mix that may not line up with their audience’s tested preferences.

If you are a fan of moderation, you will likely see less of it as the media gatekeepers recede in prominence.

He found that those with power are impaired in a specific neural process—mirroring—that leads to empathy.

The process through which we choose leaders neutralizes and reduces the capacities we want most in them. It’s cumulative as well; the longer you are in it, the more extreme the effects are likely to be over time.

It later came to light that the problem was related to a DNC request to build a conversion tool for the raw data just weeks before the caucus.

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. For thousands of Americans, it was literally death by bureaucracy.

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.

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. They will fail us during the next crisis, and we will be left crying for answers time and again.

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.

there are several interrelated problems with our media ecosystem, all of them having to do with the changing business models in journalism, and they each have devastating effects: Local journalism lost its revenue drivers and is dying. National media rewards polarizing punditry over substantive news. And social media platforms are driven toward ever more extreme sentiments and perspectives.

Local newspapers took off back in 1833 when Benjamin Day of the New York Sun realized he could sell papers for only a penny each and make money off advertising.

Fortress, in turn, is owned by SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate. The combined entity, which kept the name Gannett, owns and operates five hundred newspapers in addition to The Des Moines Register, including USA Today, the Detroit Free Press, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

A decline in local journalism has been linked to fewer candidates running for mayor and lower turnout in state and local elections.

The cost of municipal bonds went up without local news in one study.

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.

In 2020, Oxford University researchers found evidence that the governments of seventy different countries practiced online disinformation, often via social media.

“surveillance capitalism”—a term coined by the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff—in which companies have an incentive to keep feeding us advertisements and keep track of us to the point where our attention is being bought and sold.

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

I had been in national politics only two years, and already I was facing choices based on loyalties and relationships and people who had fought for me and sacrificed for me. Imagine all of the relationships that accrue to people over ten, twenty, thirty years in politics. How many of their choices too would be shaded by trust and loyalty over the newcomer who might just be the right person at the right time?

New York City spent a staggering sum—an average of $710 million a year—on payouts for police-related lawsuits in recent years (the entire NYPD’s budget is about $6 billion, so the budget for payouts takes up a significant portion of it).

Samuel Sinyangwe, co-founder of Campaign Zero, is a data scientist who has been researching police violence data and different policy responses for years. He has identified a number of changes that correspond to lower loss of life in encounters with police.

The first is direct and obvious: more restrictive rules and laws governing use of force. Police departments have rules and guidelines as to what techniques they can use in different situations. Banning choke holds, requiring a warning before shooting, requiring de-escalation and a continuum of force, requiring exhaustion of nonlethal alternatives, and banning firing at moving vehicles can all reduce deadly encounters. So can having a duty to intervene if another officer uses excessive force. Campaign Zero estimates that adopting these measures and reporting could reduce deaths by police violence by as much as 72 percent.

that new recruits received an average of fifty-eight hours on shooting a gun and using deadly force and only eight hours on de-escalating violence.

Their analysis found that the more officers with histories of excessive force were in a group, the higher the risk that other officers in that group would have complaints lodged against them.

one in every four people killed by police has a serious mental illness.

Over the last four decades, incumbents have a success rate of 94 percent in winning reelection.

The average successful House campaign raised more than $1.6 million in recent cycles. In the Senate, it was more than $10.4 million.

Incumbents routinely decline to debate their challengers, figuring it’s only a losing proposition to give the upstart any visibility and voters won’t really care or notice.

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.

“You get to the Capitol and you see all the marble, as if it’s there to remind you that nothing will change.”

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.

“It’s real! Debbie just said they lost a plant that had fifteen hundred workers and if you’re a laid-off worker from that plant and you look up and say, ‘What is the Democratic Party doing for me?’ it’s unclear. And we can talk about a unifying message…but then there’s the reality on the ground where 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.”

if each party was actually fighting for the other party’s territory, you’d see more moderates elected to office and lower racialized rhetoric. Fourth, winning over at least some proportion of these voters is necessary in order to not just win an election but pass legislation.

One study showed that the number of people who were actually independent and who could be persuaded to vote for one party or the other is now only 7 percent of voters, down from 22 percent in the 1980s and 1990s.

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.

We have become a whole network of people bullshitting each other into believing that smart people are thinking about it and good things are happening that will address the problems. And then we all just go back to whatever we were doing.

You make false promises regularly or lay claim to powers you do not have. “Together we can ensure that every child has the kind of opportunity that they deserve in our community.” “If we come together, there’s no limit to what we can accomplish.” “If we listen to each other, we can create a bright future for all.” You are all about the singing of brighter horizons.

We accept ridiculous statements on their face because we have grown to regard them less as real actions or policy statements and more as simply value statements and political representations of the world as you wish it to be.

Right before he left office, Justin Amash, a Michigan congressman, said, “I’m seeing all of these campaign ads right now, and everyone’s saying, ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that’…No you’re not. You’re not going to do that, because you have no power to do it. The system is not designed to allow you to do that.” It’s much easier and more compelling for a politician to say “I’m going to fight for each and every one of you!” than “There’s not much I can do about that one.”

Of course, politicians and journalists reinforce each other’s fictions. I’m reporting on you because you represent the people. I’ll catch you if you misspeak, because your speaking right is the most important thing; if you spoke right, all would be solved. This is important.

The mistrust that is building up in American life is born in large part of the pervasiveness of constructive institutionalism. We have conversations about what we can do better while the reality degrades around us, increasing the divergence between the world we’re talking about and the world as it is.