Andrew Yang's appeal hinges on an economic anxiety that borders on outright fear
, the New York entrepreneur running for the Democratic presidential nomination, cannot be accused of lacking confidence. “I only see two outcomes in this race. One, I win. Or, two, someone else wins and takes the vast majority of my ideas into the White House,” he says from his campaign headquarters in midtown Manhattan.
His appeal hinges on an economic anxiety that borders on outright fear. Mr Yang decided to call his campaign book “The War on Normal People”. In it he describes the advent of automation and artificial intelligence as “very scary”. He warns that millions of truck-drivers forced out of work by self-driving cars and retail workers done in by automated kiosks could riot. “If we don’t start getting ahead of that curve, we’re going to be doomed to worse than Donald Trump over time,” he says.
Its cost does not make the Freedom Dividend an outlier in the primary debate. Most of the Democratic candidates are pitching multi-trillion plans of one sort or another. Mr Sanders wants Medicare for all , while Elizabeth Warren would like to channel a few trillion towards green manufacturing, free college and universal child care . All these ideas would have seemed like fringy leftism to mainstream Democrats just four years ago.
His most valuable policy contributions may lie elsewhere, however. Mr Yang argues, more persuasively than most politicians, that he chooses his positions on data and evidence. His campaign website sports 106 proposals, running from the consequential—imposing a tax on carbon pollution, legalising marijuana, decriminalising opioids and reforming zoning rules—to the zany, like offering free marriage counselling to all. Many of them are quite sensible.
A good few are refreshingly unorthodox too. Mr Yang has not shied away from pointing out the errors in the thinking of his competitors. He thinks a federal jobs guarantee—embedded in the widely accepted proposal for a Green New Deal—is a “well-intended but terrible idea”. The “liberal training fantasy”—turning coal miners into coders—is mere “wish-fulfilment as policy talk”.
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