The War on Normal People Quotes

“Grit, persistence, adaptability, financial literacy, interview skills, human relationships, conversation, communication, managing technology, navigating conflicts, preparing healthy food, physical fitness, resilience, self-regulation, time management, basic psychology and mental health practices, arts, and music—all of these would help students and also make school seem much more relevant. 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.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“The market rewards business leaders for making things more efficient. Efficiency doesn’t love normal people.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“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.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Scarcity will not save us. Abundance will.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“There’s a big distinction between humans as humans and humans as workers. The former are indispensable. The latter may not be.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, trust, and cohesion—the stuff of civilization—are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“The future without jobs will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“The challenge we must overcome is that humans need work more than work needs us.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“There is limited or no market reward at present for keeping families together, upgrading infrastructure, lifelong education, preventative care, or improving democracy.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Time only flows in one direction, and progress is a good thing as long as its benefits are shared.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Intelligence and character aren’t the same things at all. Pretending that they are will lead us to ruin.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“The market doesn’t care what’s best for us”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“College is being dramatically overprescribed and oversold as the answer to all of our job-related economic problems.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Are we not, as the citizens of the United States, the owners of this country?”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“The system rewards activity and output over health improvements and outcomes.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“The United States should provide an annual income of $12,000 for each American aged 18–64, with the amount indexed to increase with inflation.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“One could argue that it is essential for any democracy to do all it can to keep its population free of a mindset of scarcity in order to make better decisions.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Our lack of family leave for new parents is barbaric, antifamily, sexist, regressive, economically irrational, and just plain stupid.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Our job-based health insurance system does the very thing we most want to avoid—it discourages businesses from hiring.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“The subsistence and scarcity model is grinding more and more people up. Preserving it is the thing we must give up first.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Knowing what’s truly normal or average in a big country like America requires some work.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“increasing automation accompanied by social ruin. We must make the market serve humanity rather than have humanity continue to serve the market.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Capital doesn’t care about us.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Some of the winners in the current system would make less money in the new world even as patient care improves.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“We are entering an age of super-intelligent computers that can take any complex data set—every legal precedent, radiology film, asset price, financial transaction, actuarial table, Facebook like, customer review, résumé bullet, facial expression, and so on—synthesize it, and then perform tasks and make decisions in ways that are as good as or better than the smartest human in the vast majority of cases.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Our fixation on college readiness leads our high school curricula toward purely academic subjects and away from life skills.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“The best approach is what they do at the Cleveland Clinic—doctors simply get paid flat salaries.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“So the average American worker has less than an associate’s degree and makes about $17 per hour.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy—all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job.” Most jobs today are a means for survival. Without their structure and support, people suffer psychologically and socially, as well as financially and even physically.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

“The relationship between humanity and work involves money, but in something of a negative correlation. The jobs and roles that are the most human and would naturally be most attractive tend to pay nothing or close to nothing. Mother, father, artist, writer, musician, coach, teacher, storyteller, nurturer, counselor, dancer, poet, philosopher, journalist—these roles often are either unpaid or pay so little that it is difficult to survive or thrive in many environments. Many of these roles have high positive social impacts that are ignored by the market. On the other hand, the most lucrative jobs tend to be the most inorganic. Corporate lawyers, technologists, financiers, traders, management consultants, and the like assume a high degree of efficiency. The more that a person can submerge one’s humanity to the logic of the marketplace, the higher the reward.”
― Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future