The War on Normal People Andrew Yang Review

New York. Hachette. 2018. 284 pages.

The case for universal basic income (UBI)—whereby the land makes regular, unconditional income payments to all its working-age citizens—is gaining increasing traction in the Us. Though the concept of UBI is naught new to American politics, it has acquired renewed relevance in the face of a pressing mod consequence: the automation of jobs. Andrew Yang makes one of the more than noteworthy arguments in favor of UBI in his urgent new book, The War on Normal People. Yang is clearly a human of action. He is the founder of Venture for America and has recently filed for candidacy in the 2020 U.s. presidential elections. With The State of war on Normal People, he non only draws attention to current socioeconomic issues simply goes on to proposes physical measures to face them.

Yang uses the give-and-take "normal" in the sense of "average" simply reminds his readers that the "average" falls lower than they might recollect. Every bit Yang points out, "the normal American did not graduate from college and doesn't accept an acquaintance's degree. He or she possibly attended higher for one year or graduated high school [and] has a internet worth of . . . well-nigh $6K excluding home and vehicle equity." It is these "normal" Americans for whom the consequences of shifting from human to machine labor have been and will be most dire. Although "automation [has already] eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2015," Yang believes that the bulk of its affect is yet to come: "I love commercialism[, merely] commercialism with the assistance of technology is most to plow on normal people."

Still, to call up that high-qualification white-collar jobs are immune to this change would exist mistaken. The key benchmark for the automation of a profession is the extent to which that profession is repetitive or routine, not the extent to which it is manual. Because that the Federal Reserve classifies almost half of current US jobs every bit "routine," Yang contends that the potential bear upon of connected automation is serious indeed. Yang sees as misguided in the current context the claim that technological revolutions e'er compensated loss of certain professions by the cosmos of new fields of employment. A number of specific manual professions becoming obsolete does not compare in quality or impact to any (including whatsoever new) routine piece of work being lost to man employment. "History repeats itself until it doesn't," he cautions.

Every bit a solution to the socioeconomic vulnerability that would upshot from increasing automation, Yang proposes to pay a universal bones income, whereby each working-age adult is to receive a "Freedom Dividend" of $1,000 a month, which roughly hits the current national poverty line. To estimate the bear on of his proposal, he lists a multitude of electric current and historical UBI experiments (from Alaska and Finland to UBI aid payments in Kenya), which seem to all offer similarly positive conclusions. For instance, in the Canadian town of Dauphin, 13 thousand people received a four-twelvemonth UBI, lifting everyone higher up the poverty line, with researchers finding "minimal effect on work. The only groups who worked substantially less were new mothers and teenagers. . . . Birth rates for women nether 20-5 dropped. High school graduation rates went up . . . hospital visits went down. . . . Domestic violence went down as did mental disease."

Yang, however, spends picayune time scrutinizing how outcomes of these local experiments, generally conducted on culturally homogeneous groups, would scale up to the national level. He also fails to discuss the functioning of existing national (notably the earned income-tax credit) and foreign poverty-reduction programs. Much less does he counterbalance such experience against his own proposal. Lastly, in his word of UBI, he does non consider whatsoever variants of negative income tax for depression-income brackets, a UBI-like musical instrument favored by American conservatives effectually Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The cost of Yang's liberty dividend is put at "about an boosted $one.three trillion per year on top of existing welfare programs." This might seem rather small compared to the size of the overall U.s.a. economic system, which weighs in at about $19 trillion per year. But information technology is far from negligible when compared to the current annual federal budget of just over $iv trillion. Yang wants to fund these costs by raising the value-added tax (VAT) to about one-half the European level and cites a study by the Roosevelt Establish, which estimates that "$12,000 per year per adult . . . would permanently grow the economy by 12.56 to 13.ten per centum," making his plan effectively self-funding. Notably, he does non discuss any study disquisitional of the macroeconomic impact of his proposal.

Alongside its costs, the second standard statement against UBI is the reduced incentive to take employment and the supposed continued deprivation of meaning that work provides. Yang, backed by the aforementioned number of UBI experiments, is skeptical of how far receiving poverty-line benefits really reduces the piece of work incentive and how much meaning some jobs really give. He does, however, fully concede the plethora of negative effects correlated with unemployment and offers his vision of "Homo Commercialism" in response. At the core of this idea lies a "new currency—Digital Social Credits[—which] would reward people for doing things that serve the customs." He thinks of these social credits equally effectively representing "time as the new money." Parenting, teaching, volunteering, writing—Yang suggests many important activities dramatically undervalued by current markets, which are to autumn under this additional regime of remuneration.

It is like shooting fish in a barrel to exist skeptical or even dismissive of Yang's proposal for a freedom dividend paired with a social credit system. All the same regardless of how one might view his solution, the threat of automation nevertheless stands. In that location are many elements of UBI that are promising, non least its simplicity and minimal administration needs, which hope to increment transparency and equality in the distribution of state subsidies. Ultimately, what forms of new or existing subsidies will prove almost effective is not going to get decided by statement merely by action. We must grow bolder and broader in what we try. A version of UBI might very well exist a necessary component to what we end up shaping as our answer to the momentous changes brought on past the connected growth of machine labor. Merely no matter if or how we choose to pursue UBI, even its well-nigh stalwart proponents must recognize—as Yang does—that UBI alone cannot be the magic spell that cures all society's ailments. Fundamental challenges such as admission to health care and education would remain similarly pressing with UBI, every bit they are now.

When following the challenges Yang discusses, nosotros might feel as one of his friends did, "like I'm getting punched in the face up repeatedly." Nevertheless, Yang equally manages to convey an incredible sense of community. It feels similar we are in this together, and in that location might just be a way out.

Felix Haas
Zurich, Switzerland

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Source: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/november/war-normal-people-truth-about-americas-disappearing-jobs-and-why-universal-basic

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