Andrew Yang

Author of The War on Normal People (Kyle read 2019), the book whose central argument is that Automation is “not a future threat but a present, accelerating reality” the 20th-century political and civic machinery has no answer for. The wiki frames Yang as the Venture For America founder writing “from inside the rooms where policy gets made” — qualified to warn because he’s “been in the room with the people who are meant to steer our society” and found “the machinery is weak.” His signature proposal is the Freedom Dividend, a VAT-funded Universal Basic Income pitched as an ownership stake — an ESOP for the country — that gives “all citizens an honest stake in society.” Surrounding it are his ideas on “Human Capitalism” (the person, not the dollar, as the economic unit), economic insecurity as a “bandwidth tax” that makes a society dumber, and education reform away from college-as-cull toward Career Technical Education.

Context: Andrew Yang is an American entrepreneur and politician who founded Venture For America and ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on a Universal Basic Income (“Freedom Dividend”) platform. He later launched the Forward Party. The War on Normal People (2018) is his book on automation and UBI.

Where this appears

• The War on Normal People — author; his case on automation, the Freedom Dividend / Universal Basic Income, and Human Capitalism