I hadn’t known much about Andrew Yang at all until very recently. As it happens he was on Chris Hayes tonight, talking among other things about his idea for a universal basic income and the fact that the US economy has become “increasingly punitive.”
Importantly he discusses automation which is the giant in the room, all too often ignored. The Left works for increased minimum wage and health care and the Right rails about immigrants who are Stealing Our Jobs, which is absurd — automation for all its blessings has taken jobs from manufacturing to the white collar professions. And we need to rethink the whole relationship of people to work, and just who exactly an economy is supposed to serve.
Americans are married to the Puritanical idea of work for work’s sake, to keep the devil at bay of course — so the idea of a universal basic income, or time spent studying, being a philosopher or an artist or a poet, doing pure research — research and science without a corporate goal or a corporate patron, is just anathema. And typically this “anathema” is labeled, socialism, which in America is akin to a taboo.
I think we are long past the time when we should readjust our attitudes toward work, money, the importance of work that doesn’t necessarily result in a “useful” product or a corporate profit. Machines have ironically made this possible but if we don’t seize the moment to let them do their work and free us to do ours we’ll wind up enslaved.
They didn’t have a tape of the Chris Hayes segment yet but I found a good article including video of Yang on Real Clear Politics,
www.realclearpolitics.com/…
Well worth a look and a thought, I believe.