He has the temerity to think that we could argue about different things, that we could structure our society around something other than paid jobs, and that we could renew a sense of mutual obligation. In spite of all these shortcomings-or perhaps because of them-Yang’s book still has something to offer to contemporary American politics. The prestigious parts of our world are shabbier than Yang appreciates, and his solutions are dubious. Our technological progress is more like a trickle than a raging river, our meritocracy isn’t half as meritorious as he believes, and the people who have a basic income’s worth of extra cash don’t generally act as if they’ve been unleashed to do great things. We may feel trapped in our merciless meritocracy, in which the smart people work overtime to make the normal people superfluous, but we can use the immense wealth that our technological intrepidity has yielded to relieve our common estate, thereby bringing forth a new birth of freedom.īracing as all this may be, we don’t actually live in the world that Yang describes. Yang offers himself as an emissary of a different future, in which Americans have rediscovered their common humanity and honored it through egalitarian redistribution in the form of a basic income. The worst case is widespread despair, violence, and the utter collapse of our society and economy.” The stakes are existential in his book, The War on Normal People, Yang says that “without dramatic change, the best-case scenario is a hyper-stratified society like something out of The Hunger Games or Guatemala with an occasional mass shooting. The poor souls who are not extraordinary will need a lot of help-indeed, they already do. “Efficiency doesn’t love normal people,” he drolly tells his readers.
But most people will be out of luck, with no honest way to make a decent living.
A minority will help steer these developments and become fabulously wealthy, a larger class of service professionals will make good livings working for them, and some others may find enough breadcrumbs to make their way. While other candidates parade their righteous fury, fume at each other, and compete to see who can denounce the President most forcefully and contemptuously, Yang calmly sets forth a political vision that is, at least on its own terms, quite compelling.Īs he tells it, we are in the beginning stages of an earthshaking crisis-what he calls The Great Displacement-in which huge swaths of American workers will lose their livelihoods to machines whose capabilities will exceed their own. It’s hard not to root for Andrew Yang, whose lack of pretention and sincerity set him apart in the contest for the 2020 Democratic nomination. The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
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