Bill Clinton’s campaign theme song was Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow); Andrew Yang’s might have been “Start thinking about the day after tomorrow.”
Yang, an Asian American entrepreneur and political neophyte, ended what he had called “the nerdiest presidential campaign in history” after last week’s New Hampshire primary, saying that as a “math guy,” it was clear to him from the numbers that he was not going to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Indeed, he won only 2.8% of the vote.
Nevertheless, he got a lot further than a number of experienced politicians, including members of Congress and governors, in a surprising campaign that, in the words of The New York Times, “developed a fiercely loyal following of disaffected voters across the political spectrum.” He raised $30 million and rose from less than 1% in the polls to between 4% and 5% by early 2020.
Yang’s signature issue was a call for a universal basic income, or “Freedom Dividend,” under which the federal government would send every American adult a monthly check for $1,000, without regard to income or employment. Medicare and Medicaid would not be affected, but those receiving government benefits such as food stamps could choose to keep receiving them or take the $12,000 a year instead. The scheme would be paid for partly by imposing a 10% value-added tax on goods and services at every stage of production.
The idea is not new, and experts continue to debate its efficacy, but the value in Yang’s rebranding of it lies more in his analysis of why it’s needed than in the remedy itself. He warned that the country is going through a profound economic transformation — a “fourth industrial revolution” — in which automation threatens to create mass unemployment, chaos and perhaps even violence, against which the Freedom Dividend would provide a buffer.
Automation does not only threaten factory workers and truck drivers, Yang wrote in an op-ed for the Times last November. Bookkeepers, retail and food service workers, office clerks, call center employees, even teachers, accountants, journalists, doctors and lawyers face the risk of being replaced by machines, he argued.
Again, some experts say the threat of automation is overblown, or that it cannot be predicted. But it seems to us that Yang is on to something here that needs to be considered as a big-picture risk along with climate change. In fact, he makes a link between the two: 78% of Americans live in a state of financial insecurity, he told the Times editorial board, and “if you can’t pay next month’s rent, it’s very hard to worry about climate change.” And it’s not impossible to imagine that the chaos produced by each could merge to produce social unrest on a massive scale across the globe.
Certainly it’s hard in the day-to-day heat of a presidential campaign for candidates to give extensive thought to the forces that are transforming the American economy and how they might be channeled to promote the public interest, or at least to mitigate harm. Yang provided a stimulating dose of that kind of thinking. The next Democratic president might want to take advantage of his fresh perspective by appointing Yang to a new Cabinet office: Secretary of the Future.