The Democratic candidate for
[Capitalism is] pushing our population to a mindset of scarcity, of nastiness. And that’s why Universal Basic Income is so crucial. Because it gets the boot off the people’s throats. And replaces the mindset of scarcity with a mindset of abundance and rationality and optimism and capacity.”
Andrew Yang to Joe Rogan
Yang’s plan for Universal Basic Income (UBI) is to create a program where people can opt-in for $1000 monthly from the government, what he is calling a Freedom Dividend. This is in hopes to ease the stress of the people and to allow more room for entrepreneurship. Yang’s ideas are similar to that of the world of Star Trek: make money more meaningless and life will be more simple.
Right now, as cited by Yang, depression-related diseases are at an all-time high, including the act of suicide itself. As a person in the United States, it is surprisingly more stressful than one would assume, having so much freedom. “If you give someone an IQ test after telling them ‘here’s a bill that you can’t pay,’ their score actually goes down, by 13 points,” which Yang says is an entire level lower. Stressing people out turns off our executive functioning skills, meaning our ability to act like a rational human being and make
Yang also says that America is at an all-time low for birth-rates, marriages, moving, and other actions that dip into heavy finances (and happiness). While this sounds like basic rationality, it has more to do with the need to not spend extra money.
Yang wants to create a transitional “tzar” that will adjust the working class into a new way of living. “It’s not immigrants,” Yang underlines, it is automatic machinery. AI will replace informational jobs, trucking, cashiering, and other walk-in, and nearly all automatable, jobs.
“If you go to an Amazon facility, it is robots as far as the eye can see,” and Amazon is the third-largest international product distributors. Meaning the third-largest retailer leans more on robotics than humans, Yang sees this as being due to the fact that the future is now. These jobs won’t exist and they will be taken by robots.
It is important not to be worried that AI is taking the jobs that the people necessarily want. I believe that people are worried about AI because it is going to be taking the jobs that people have always had. The truth is, the jobs that people have always had are already being taken over by machines since the dawn of the Industrial Age.
What we are now in is the Post-Industrial Age, where content-creating is the thriving sector of the economy because the people want to be served entertainment. Meaning, there soon there will not be as many jobs available, as AI will be taking them. And having an answer to this should be ultimately relieving, a simple $1000 stipend monthly.
“A better future” is a phrase constantly thrown around without any real answer, and the answer Yang is trying to give is this: end money-based capitalism. Because it is making us, as a people, worse and not better. And with the Freedom Dividend, we may be closer to this “better future” goal.
The Joe Rogan Experience is an excellent platform for Andrew Yang to share his views and plans for his potential presidency. The podcast is #5 in the United States, #4 in Great Britain, and #3 in Canada for Apple’s All Podcasts category, according to Chartable. And that does not configure in his “views” on YouTube or other streaming serveses.