Andrew Yang is my family's #1 candidate.
Last weekend, my son and I drove three hours to Waterloo, Iowa to see Yang in person.
In a brew-pub, Josh and I were happy to stand (having sat in the car for three hours) to the side of the rows of chairs, just a few yards from where Yang was about to deliver an eloquent stump speech.
Now, for context, let me tell you that I have been working around law school books for about 20 years. When I was hired as a temp in 1994, the publisher gave me a list of names and told me to call everyone on the list and explain that I represented the publisher, we were exploring the idea of a new Law & Policy series, and what did they think of that?
One of the names on the list was US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. I had only the vaguest knowledge of the US Supreme Court. It did not extend to the names of every judge on the court, only the most high-profile judges whose names turned up regularly on the evening news. (We had evening news then.)
Justice Stephen Breyer kept a pretty low profile.
I dutifully called him.
There were gatekeepers, of course, but I used the prestige of the publisher as a battering ram, and bashed my way through every gate, one by one.
At last, I had Justice Stephen Breyer on the phone.
I explained how the publisher was contemplating a new Law and Policy series. What did he think of that?
He talked about the intersection of law and policy. He gave no indication that his time was super valuable.
I type fast, and tapped out every word on a loud typewriter, a constant patter in the background of our chat. The smarter people are, the faster I have to type.
Most people on that list had, at most, one or two opinions on the subject of law & policy, but they might keep me on the phone for 30 minutes. I'd only type those two ideas. I wouldn't type every word, why would I? Sometimes, I'd just stop typing, and listen, politely.
But a Supreme Court Justice--that's hecka typing.
Sure, I shouldn't have bothered the man--jaws dropped when the editors learned what I had done, though the publisher was greatly amused.
And while my chat with Breyer was extraordinary, speaking with smart people became a normal part of my job.
This is a round-about way of saying, I am not so easily impressed.
Andrew Yang impresses the heck out of me.
In that brew-pub, within reach of the first row of seated Iowans,Yang spoke for twenty minutes without a single "uh" or "um." And yet, he didn't seem smooth or smarmy. He came across as extremely focused, with a perfect command and mastery of the facts.
Sure, it's a stump speech, and he's given the same talk in various permutations a hundred times or more. But it didn't feel that way. It felt fresh, energized, and earnest.
The Q and A was the same. No uhs or ums.
A woman who had started a for-profit local newspaper asked, How might the federal government support local news outlets struggling to survive?
Yang (I'm paraphrasing) talked about matching grants with enough detail to show that he had given this some thought and wasn't making it up on the spot. Local journalism is the key to a healthy democracy, he said, citing the alarming trend of local newspapers failing and disappearing in towns and cities across the country.
You may think Yang's proposal of a Universal Basic Income, or the Freedom Dividend, is a fringe concept. But really, the problem is that it is a solution to a problem that many of us don't have yet. A lot of Iowans have it, but a lot of my FB friends do not. And that problem is that many jobs in retail have disappeared, thanks to Amazon; and more jobs will disappear over then next decade as AI replaces humans in customer service.
Where you think Yang is crazy, I think he's visionary. I think Yang has a more sophisticated understanding of technology than other candidates. He knows how technology is being developed around the world for business interests, and he can follow its trajectory through the next decade.
Andrew Yang is the only candidate anticipating what AI will mean for jobs in customer service--where people can expect to lose their jobs to AI robots just as people in manufacturing and retail have lost their jobs to automation and Amazon, respectively.
(Since I started in legal ed publishing, the jobs of composition--setting book pages--and printing & binding have all been moved to India. In 1994, those jobs were all done in the US.)
It's useful to know which way the wind is blowing, to be prepared and adapt to the foreseeable future.
Of all the candidates, Andrew Yang seems to be the only one thinking and planning with real vision and foresight.
While Uniform Basic Income (UBI) would help to alleviate poverty immediately, and provide not only a safety net but a better quality of life for all Americans, most people dismiss it as Andrew Yang's pipe dream.
When we consider the thousands of jobs that have been and continue to be eliminated by a handful of tech companies (that are making ever-greater profits), and when we recall that our personal data is being amassed by those same companies and sold and resold for billions of dollars (of which we see not a penny), finding ways to tax these behemoths to fund UBI kind of snaps into focus.
For a thoroughly researched and compelling argument for UBI and other proposals--on climate change and a host of issues--please go to Yang2020.com. There, you'll discover the real Andrew Yang, the one with whom the post-debate fact checkers from the Washington Post cannot find fault.
No comments:
Post a Comment