Andrew Yang's Future
Andrew Yang, presidential candidate. (c/o Joe Raedle for Getty Images)
THE debate on the left over whom to support in 2020 is starting to grow stale. Bernie Sanders is the returning hero, Elizabeth Warren an acceptable alternative, and anyone else is toxic. The candidacy of Andrew Yang, the first person to run for President on a platform of universal basic income (UBI), is considered a kind of weird sideshow, too much of an oddity and in any case too laden with the trappings of corporatism and tech-bro-ness to be a palatable option. That is a mistake: Yang’s platform is easily the equal of Sanders’ and Warren’s for a diagnosis of capitalist ills, and its outlook, centered around the premise of UBI, is just as bold and considerably more forward-looking. Yang’s view of American political economy, bolstered by striking insights like that of the unequivocal correlation between the prevalence of industrial robots and support for Donald Trump, is refreshingly factual and surprisingly radical. His candidacy warrants the left’s attention. And it deserves a far more considered appraisal than that of Honda Wang’s recent article, which dismisses Yang as an apologist for “capitalist-centered capitalism.”
Wang’s piece devotes much energy to criticizing Yang for being too well-educated, too wealthy, and for having a savior complex. The last charge is mostly in relation to Venture for America, the nonprofit organization Yang ran between its founding in 2011 and 2017. Venture for America used donor money to install high-powered Ivy League graduates in cities where they wouldn’t normally end up, particularly places like Detroit, which were then reeling from post-crash deindustrialization. The idea was that these fellows would create startups that would help revitalize the local economy, a kind of talent-redistribution scheme to combat brain drain in places that could ill afford it. Despite Yang’s being honored by the Obama White House as a “Champion of Change” for his idea, Venture for America never really worked. Yang says he quit the nonprofit because he realized he could never create as many jobs as automation would destroy, but the reality is that Venture for America created, by the most generous measure, a few thousand jobs at the very most (compared to a goal of one hundred thousand) during his seven-year tenure. A net-positive result, but one that demonstrated the hubris of trying to use philanthropy and venture capital-driven “innovation” as a stand-in for public investment. Nonetheless, it can at least be said that Yang was trying a novel solution to the seemingly insurmountable problem of educated élites tending to gravitate away from the places that need them most.
Whether or not Yang believes that startups will save the world, that is not the focus of his Presidential campaign. Yang’s policy positions (all 120-plus of them) place him firmly within the revitalized left of the post-2016 Democratic Party. These include progressive stances on drug legalization, campaign finance, mass incarceration, carbon taxation, and Medicare for All, which he has supported from the inception of his campaign. And while “innovation” may be the favored buzzword of Silicon Valley hyper-capitalists, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t describe our public policy. It is a remarkable fact that the leader of the left in both Britain and America is a man in his seventies whose fundamental vision is one of nostalgia for the “social democratic moment” of the 1960’s, a time when both men were about the age their hordes of youthful admirers are now.
Criticisms of Yang often smack of fear of the new, but the new is just what our current political discourse—monopolized as it is by aphoristic, largely fact-free arguments over the preservation of old jobs, old borders, old ways of eking out a social existence—badly needs. Consider Yang’s proposal to include free marriage counseling in Medicare for All as a way of combatting the poverty associated with single parenthood—a serious issue, and one that Republicans continually decry for political gain, Democrats all but ignore, and no one offers any solutions to. Making marital support universal but voluntary would address part of the root of the problem (two-parent households produce happier and more successful children) without getting into the kind of coercive moralizing that the right thrives on (the institution of marriage is the “bedrock of society” and so on). That is innovation for the people, and typical of Yang’s policy thinking.
From Markets to Humans
The most important of Yang’s “new” ideas (and the main target of Wang’s critique) is UBI. Yang is proposing a “freedom dividend” of $1,000 per month to be paid to every American citizen over the age of 18, funded by a combination of new taxes, funds redirected from existing programs, and additional revenue and savings resulting from the implementation of UBI itself. Wang’s principle objection echoes a common leftist view: that UBI would entrench market structures and shield them from more radical reforms, thus prolonging the existence of capitalism as currently constituted.
This critique is wrong on two counts. The first count is that, to be legitimate, the same criticism would have to be extended to every tax-funded unconditional benefit, all of which make it easier for people to survive in capitalism without directly challenging its underlying structures. Does Wang really think that social security exacerbates capitalism’s power imbalances? The pride of the New Deal, social security and its associated programs may not be exactly conducive to a socialist revolution; but nor do they have anything to do with the worsening ravages of inequality and wage slowdown over the last half-century.
The second problem with the critique has to do with Wang’s assertion that UBI relies on “the same market forces” that created the problems Yang now wants to solve. This gets UBI exactly wrong. The great raison d’être of a basic income is to create a system of humanistic social valuation that transcends and is unrelated to the existing system of valuation, which is the market. In this way, UBI would not deconstruct the market structures but rather begin to bypass them. Consider one example: right now, the market communicates a seemingly limitless demand for corporate consultants, but very little demand for artists. Thus many young people with a talent for music or painting may well end up becoming consultants because they would rather earn a living than starve doing what they love and actually have talent in. This misalignment is what Yang means to address when he speaks of transitioning to a “human-centered capitalism.” It is also the reason that the long-held futurists’ vision of a leisure-oriented, quasi-utopian economy arising from automation has never been realized. What those futurists failed to consider was that capitalism might not be up to the task of translating the wealth created by machines into living wages for all. Indeed, the market currently places a high value on millions of jobs that will soon be automated out of existence along with the livelihoods they provide: not just in blue-collar industries like truck driving and sales, but in fields like consulting, medicine, and finance. Meanwhile, work that takes place in the home, like raising a child or caring for a sick relative, has no value at all according to the market. UBI would provide a cushion for workers made redundant and an income to tens of millions of full-time parents.
So while it’s true that UBI would not interrupt market forces on its own, the reason for that is precisely that it works outside, and not within the market as critics charge. UBI exists not to intensify the logic of market forces but to correct it. That is the case no matter how the program is constituted. A UBI funded by taxation, as Yang proposes, amounts to a radical and highly advanced form of social democracy; a UBI funded directly as a dividend of the returns to capital would be the first step towards a technological socialism. Either would be an improvement on the present, and to get to the second we will likely have to go through the first.
It’s true, of course, that Yang’s version of UBI would leave essentially leave people to fend for themselves in the existing capitalist system, at least for the time being. But they would do so $12,000 a year better-off, pre tax and inflation. Do left-wing critics of basic income really think that would be a bad thing? Whatever we do, the result of the automation boom and of Piketty’s inequality r>g will be increasing chaos for workers and capitalists alike. The attainment of the ultimate efficiency through the elimination of payable labor will be the greatest market failure in the history of capitalism, possibly surpassed only by global warming. Implementing a tax-funded UBI is therefore imperative both to blunt the effects of that transformation and to acclimatize the public to the idea of a universal social dividend, which must ultimately be the future of capitalism. The argument against doing so is equivalent to saying that we shouldn’t prepare for the future, which smacks of the old anti-reformist slogan “the worse the better,” and of the age-old, deranged leftist belief that making life worse for ordinary people will expose capitalism’s contradictions and quicken the pace of history. Yang is proposing a radical idea, not to quicken history but to allow people to keep up with its breakneck pace without being cast into destitution. That is much closer to the best socialist traditions than to the managerial liberalism of Michael Bloomberg.
Welfare for the Future
A major cause of the left’s persistent distrust of UBI (and of Wang’s insistence that “Yang’s philosophical approach to UBI mirrors Milton Friedman’s thinking”) is the fact that most versions of UBI would replace the current welfare state, rather than becoming another of its myriad moving parts. This claim deserves a serious rebuttal, since it might appear that all UBI proponents are making common cause with libertarians of the Friedman school who dream of dismantling the social safety net once and for all. According to a bipartisan assessment, the average welfare benefit in the US is equivalent to some $9,000 a year, considerably less than Yang’s Freedom Dividend. Furthermore, the fact that many welfare benefits disappear when recipients succeed in getting a paying job means that newly-employed workers often barely register a net increase in income. Yang's UBI of $1,000 a month would indeed replace the current welfare state, but it be a considerable expansion on what came before, and the recipients would retain the benefit throughout their lives. There is a right-libertarian vision of UBI, but this isn’t it.
UBI would also likely be more effective than the programs it would displace on account of the well-established economic fact that, in most cases, giving people money is more efficient than giving them goods or money earmarked for certain goods. Thus food stamps, housing subsidies, and other traditional forms of social assistance are thought to be less efficient than simply giving people the equivalent amount in cash, since they can then allocate the money according to their own needs. This in no way reduces the responsibility of government to collect taxes, build decent social housing, provide universal healthcare coverage, and create jobs. It simply means that the poor are equipped to make decisions for themselves, if they are given the means. That is a leftwing notion—pro the agency of working people—and it is past time the left stopped ignoring pesky economic realities that don’t immediately gibe with its preconceived ideas of a progressive program.
Why then do so many leftists still reject the reconstitution of welfare as UBI? Part of the reason is a certain romanticization of the traditional welfare state as embodied by mid-century Northern Europe, a world of strong labor unions, high tariffs, low immigration, and a litany of social programs doled out by sprawling, invigilating state apparatuses. In a changing 21st century world, that model badly needs revising: not only for reasons of economics but of left ethics. The traditional welfare model depends on a vast array of conditional, as opposed to universal, benefits. This means that the government, acting through unelected functionaries and in accordance with murky, predetermined criteria, deems on an individual basis who is and isn’t worthy of receiving a given benefit (late in his life Michel Foucault famously became a critic of the welfare state on just this basis). The myths of means testing are indeed alive and well on the left. These means tests might relate to economic realities: unemployment insurance is available only to those out of work and, in many cases, only to those who have been out of work for a certain period of time. Thus the great mass of the precariat, the underemployed, the intermittently unemployed, and the zero-hour workers, as well as those whom economic realities have forced to drop out of the workforce altogether, are excluded. Other tests might hinge on particular lifestyle choices: benefits become available only those who get married, or have children, or even abstain from alcohol or drug use. What is progressive about that? It is strange to see so many on the left arguing that UBI’s very universality is its downside. There was a time when universality was what the left stood for first and foremost.
Wang accuses Yang of having a noblesse oblige mentality when it comes to fighting poverty, and that he views the poor as “more impulsive, less creative, and angrier” (which, of course, contradicts Wang’s other argument that Yang supports the libertarian dogma that “individuals are better suited to fund their personal needs than the government.”) At issue here is a Princeton study Yang often cites which found that experiencing poverty has an equivalent effect on people of a one standard deviation-drop in I.Q. (Rutger Bregman, the radical Dutch historian who famously berated the participants of Davos over tax avoidance, mentioned the same study in his TED Talk.) The reasoning behind the finding is simple and credible: people who constantly need to worry about survival have less cognitive bandwidth to devote to things like time-management, rational decision-making, and education, all of which might actually help them escape poverty. That is not a conservative view. Rather, it perfectly complements the idea, central to our leftwing materialism (and to the historical conception of the welfare state) that the attainment of a baseline of wealth is essential for the working class—not because there is any virtue in accumulation, but because human flourishing is impossible while someone else’s boot is crushing your neck.
Wang also writes that Bernie Sanders’ “political revolution” offers the only meaningful way of ending the consolidation of political power by élites. Some of Sanders’ policies, such as eliminating corporate political donations, address the current democratic deficit directly. But the major elements of the political revolution—free college, Medicare for All—are programs of indirect empowerment. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang are all betting on the idea that economic security will give people the freedom and the impetus to finally retake their political institutions from the oligarchs who presently occupy them. But, once again, according to numerous studies on the subject, the best way of indirectly empowering people living in a capitalist society—in a strictly economic sense, at least—is simply giving them cash. In this sense, UBI is potentially the single most radical tool for political revolution. Only one candidate is proposing it.
With his venture-capitalist pedigree and aspirations of transcending the political spectrum, Yang faces an uphill battle to win over the left. But appraisals of his candidacy should be based not on on tribalistic objections to his background and its accompanying optics, but on a frank analysis of his policies and what they would represent in practice. Along with the green transition, UBI will be the most important policy proposal of the next half-century. For putting it on the map, Andrew Yang can legitimately claim to be the most radical candidate vying for the Democratic nomination. He deserves the left’s support.