The war on normal people The truth about America's disappearing jobs and why universal basic income is our future

Andrew Yang, 1975-

Sound recording - 2018

From entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the founder of Venture for America, an eye-opening look at how new technologies are erasing millions of jobs before our eyes-and a rallying cry for the urgent steps America must take, including Universal Basic Income, to stabilize our economy.

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Subjects
Genres
Audiobooks
Published
New York, NY : Hachette Audio, a division of Hachette Book Group [2018]
Language
English
Main Author
Andrew Yang, 1975- (author)
Edition
Unabridged
Item Description
Title from container.
Physical Description
6 audio discs (approximately 7 hr.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in
Playing Time
07:00:00
ISBN
9781549172106
9781549172137
  • Introduction: the great displacement
  • Part one: What's happening to jobs
  • My journey
  • How we got here
  • Who is normal in America
  • What we do for a living
  • Factory workers and truck drivers
  • White-collar jobs will disappear, too
  • On humanity and work
  • The usual objections
  • Part two: What's happening to us
  • Life in the bubble
  • Mindsets of scarcity and abundance
  • Geography is destiny
  • Men, women, and children
  • The permanent shadow class: what displacement looks like
  • Video games and the (male) meaning of life
  • The shape we're in/Disintegration
  • Part three: Solutions and human capitalism
  • The freedom dividend
  • Universal Basic Income in the real world
  • Time as the new money
  • Human capitalism
  • The strong state and the new citizenship
  • Health care in a world without jobs
  • Building people
  • Conclusion: Masters or servants.
Review by New York Times Review

If climate change, nuclear standoffs, Russian trolls, terrorist threats and Donald Trump in the White House don't cause ¡j/ou feelings of impending doom, you might think about artificial intelligence.. I'm not just referring to bigbrained robots taking over civilization from us snialler-brained.humans, but the more imminent possibility they'll take over our jobs. It's already happening. Robots and related forms of artificial intelligence are rapidly supplanting what remain of factory workers, call-center operators and clerical staff. Amazon and other online platforms are booting out retail workers. We'll soon be saying goodbye to truck drivers, warehouse personnel and professionals who do whatever can be replicated, including pharmacists, accountants, attorneys, diagnosticians, translators and financial advisers. Machines may soon do a better job than doctors at scanning for cancer. This doesn't mean a future without jobs, as some doomsayers predict. But robots will almost certainly push down wages in all the remaining human-touch jobs (child care, elder care, home health care, personal coaches, sales and so on) that robots can't do because they're not, well, human. Even today, with technology having already displaced many workers, there's no jobs crisis. The official rate of unemployment is at a remarkably low 3.8 percent. Instead, we have a good jobs crisis. The official rate hides millions of people working part time who would rather have full-time jobs, along with millions more who are too discouraged to look for work (many ending up on disability), college grads overqualified for their jobs and a growing army of contingent workers with zero job security. Blanketing all are stagnant or declining wages and vanishing job benefits. Today's typical American worker earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 1979, adjusted for inflation. Nearly 80 percent of adult Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next paycheck will be. Advancing technologies aren't the only cause of this predicament, but notwithstanding Trump's claim to the contrary, technology is a bigger culprit than trade. The economy keeps growing yet most economic gains are going to a few - largely financiers and, increasingly, inventors and owners of the digitized devices that are replacing good jobs. Our economic system isn't designed for this. If the trend continues, it's unclear who will even earn enough to buy all the future robots. Economic change on this scale doesn't happen without something cracking. The shift from farm to factory featured decades of bloody labor conflict; the move from factory to office and other sedentary jobs caused more upheaval. What will happen when robots push most people out of steady work and into lower-wage gig jobs? I doubt we'll see a revolution. A more likely scenario is a slow slouch toward authoritarianism and xenophobia. We may already be there. What's the answer? Here in the Bay Area where I live, where inventors and engineers are busily digitizing everything, many civic and business leaders are touting something called a universal basic income, or U.B.I. It's universal in the sense that everyone would receive it, basic in that it would be just enough to live on and cash income rather than voucher-based, like food stamps or Section 8 housing. To the rest of America, a U.B.I. may seem like a pipe dream, but from my vantage point some form of it seems inevitable. Several recent books have provided good background briefings for what a U.B.I. could be, including those by the labor leader Andy Stern, the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and the Belgian academics Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght. To these offerings, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, adds his own, somewhat breathless version in "The War on Normal People." Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, provides a similarly upbeat, although more measured, assessment in "Give People Money." Both are useful primers on the case for a U.B.I. The two books cover so much of the same terrain that I'm tempted to wonder whether they were written by the same robot, programmed for slightly different levels of giddy enthusiasm. Both cite Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman as early supporters of a U.B.I. Both urge that a U.B.I. be set at $1,000 a month for every American. Both point out that with poverty currently defined as an income for a single adult of less than $12,000 a year, such a U.B.I. would, by definition, eliminate poverty for the 41 million Americans now living below the poverty line. It would also improve the bargaining power of millions of low-wage workers - forcing employers to increase wages, add benefits and improve conditions in order to retain them. If a U.B.I. replaced specific programs for the poor, it would also reduce government bureaucracy, minimize government interference in citizens' lives and allow people to avoid the stigma that often accompanies government assistance. By virtue of being available to all, a U.B.I. would not only guarantee the material existence of everyone in a society; it would establish a baseline for what membership in that society means. U.B.I.'s critics understandably worry that it would spur millions to drop out of the labor force, induce laziness or at least rob people of the structure and meaning work provides. Both Yang and Lowrey muster substantial research to rebut these claims. I'm not sure they need it. After all, $12,000 ayear doesn't deliver a comfortable life even in the lowest-cost precincts of America, so there would still be plenty of incentive to work. Most of today's jobs provide very little by way of fulfillment or creativity anyway. A U.B.I. might give recipients a bit more time to pursue socially beneficial activities, like helping the elderly or attending to kids with special needs or perhaps even starting a new business. Yang suggests it would spur a system of "social credits" in which people trade their spare time by performing various helpful tasks for one another. (I.R.S. be warned.) Surely a U.B.I. would help compensate many people - especially women - for the unpaid labor they already contribute. As Lowrey points out, some 40 million family caregivers in America provide half a trillion dollars of unpaid adult care annually. Child care has become so expensive that one of every three stay-at-home mothers today lives below the poverty line (compared with 14 percent in 1970). But how could America possibly afford a U.B.I.? A $l,000-a-month grant to every American would cost about $3.9 trillion a year. That's about $1.3 trillion on top of existing welfare programs - roughly the equivalent of the entire federal budget, or about a fifth of the entire United States economy. Both Yang and Lowrey come up with laundry lists of potential funding sources - from soaking the rich (raising the top tax bracket to 55 percent, enlarging the estate tax and implementing new taxes on wealth, financial transactions and perhaps even the owners of the robots and related devices that are displacing jobs), to instituting a carbon tax or a value-added tax. Whatever the source of funds, it seems a safe bet that increased automation will allow the economy to continue to grow, making a U.B.I. more affordable. A U.B.I. would itself generate more consumer spending, stimulating additional economic activity. And less poverty would mean less crime, incarceration and other social costs associated with deprivation. "You know what's really expensive?" Yang asks. "Dysfunction. Revolution." If these measures still aren't enough to foot the bill, Lowrey suggests making a U.B.I. less universal by taxing away U.B.I. payments to high-income earners and reducing other forms of social insurance (for example, eliminating food stamps and welfare programs). As a last resort, she writes, a U.B.I. could be implemented as a kind of negative income tax, by which government simply ensures that every person or household has a certain minimum yearly income. This is what Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman had in mind. Lowrey figures that the cost of such a guarantee would approximate the current total costs of the earned-income tax credit, supplemental security income, housing assistance, food stamps and school lunches. She notes that the simplest way to achieve this would be to transform existing antipoverty programs into unconditional cash transfers. But there's a logical flaw in her argument. Once a U.B.I. is no longer universal or even basic (what if the poor are worse off when other forms of assistance are stripped away?), it's hard to see the point of having it in the first place. More troubling is Lowrey's blurring of the distinction between a U.B.I. that redistributes resources from the superrich to the growing number of vulnerable lower-income Americans and one that merely turns programs for the poor into cash assistance. The latter may be warranted, but it wouldn't touch America's growing scourge of inequality and economic insecurity, which will be made worse as robots take over good jobs. A core challenge in the future will be how to redistribute money from the ever richer owners of the robots and related technologies to the rest of us, who are otherwise likely to become poorer and less secure. This is not just an economic challenge but also a political one. As we know from recent history, vast fortunes translate directly into political power, and such power effectively resists redistribution. Sadly, neither of these authors discusses how to deal with this paradox. A world inhabited only by robots, their billionaire owners and a large and increasingly restive population is the plotline for countless dystopian fantasies, but it's a reality that appears to be drawing closer. If we continue on the path we're on, we will need to make fundamental choices about how to support human livelihoods and ensure equal participation in our economy and society. Most basically, we will have to confront the realities of vastly unequal economic and political power. Even if we manage to enact a U.B.I., it will not be nearly enough. ? ROBERT ?. reich, a former secretary of labor and a professor of public policy at Berkeley, is the co-creator of the Netflix documentary "Saving Capitalism" and the author of "The Common Good."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 29, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review

Yang, author of Smart People Should Build Things (2014)and founder of Venture for America, believes that the U.S. economy is unprepared for automation, though it will affect every sector of society. Yang cites business reports, government statistics, and newspaper articles, and he draws from his personal experiences and conversations with entrepreneurs, government officials, and technologists to explain the challenges of automation. He also discusses opportunities for the federal government to create reform programs like universal basic income, which can reorganize and strengthen the labor economy for the long term. As Yang shares his thoughts on the country's economic pathways ahead, his assessment of the economic trends and ramifications of automation is well explained and easy to follow. Readers interested in economic development and policies, labor trends, and industrial relations will find Yang's outlook on automation and the role of federal reform programs in addressing economic stability to be insightful and persuasive.--Pun, Raymond Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This eye-opening if depressing analysis from Yang, founder of the nonprofit Venture for America, proves far more effective at outlining an impending employment crisis in America than in offering practical solutions. Ascribing the crisis to increasing automation driven by artificial intelligence, Yang provides a sober rebuttal to more optimistic thinkers, such as Thomas Friedman, who believe that Americans can be transformed into lifelong learners, and thus keep pace with changes in the workplace that would eliminate millions of current jobs, including white-collar ones, such as attorneys specializing in document review, and even medical positions (computers have proven to be quite adept at reading and diagnosing radiology scans). Yang predicts, all too plausibly, that growing unemployment can lead to violent protests. But his efforts at offering hope fall short, since ambitious measures like providing a universal basic income for every American stand little chance in an ultrapolarized political environment. Utopian ideas like this undercut the seriousness with which his warnings about a dystopian near-future, with even greater income inequality, deserve to be received. Agent: Byrd Leavell, Waxman Leavell Literary Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

"In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart": a sobering portrait of a crumbling polity.Yang is the founder of Venture for America, a nonprofit that, like the Peace Corps, places young college graduates in urban startup companies in order to boost local economies. One place in dire need of such attention serves as a kind of canary in the American coal mine: Camden, New Jersey, a definitively contracting environment where hope is at a premium and all the negative social indicators highall because the local economy has declined and disappeared. This is all part of what the author terms the "Great Displacement," which is the product of financialization, globalization, and technologizationi.e., processes that make jobs at the lower rungs of the social ladder very hard to come by, if not extinct. This world of "normal people" may be besieged, but that of the well-heeled, well-schooled, and technological is very bright indeed. As Yang notes, the average starting salary in Silicon Valley for engineers is nearing $200,000, a draw that has led to a decline in humanities enrollments and boost in technical degrees, so much so that Stanford University might just as well be renamed the Stanford Institute of Technology. In a rather depressing tour of have and have-not places (and all too many have-not places have "a casino smack dab in the middle of their downtown"), Yang projects that the latter are likely to grow while the former will become smaller, more isolated enclaves, a vision out of H.G. Wells in which "automation and the lack of opportunity" yield a legacy of social ruin. The author's support of a guaranteed basic income is just one aspect of a platform to fend off that bleak future. He also looks at such things as the "social credit" system of bartering goods and services and reforming the higher education system to "teach and demonstrate some values."Longer on description than prescription but a provocative work of social criticism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.