If you know anything about Andrew Yang, it’s probably that he wants to give every American a $1000 per month freedom dividend. Yang, an Asian-American former tech executive, open admits that his ‘freedom dividend’ is a branded universal basic income under a new name because it polls better with the public. But how Yang has come to center his campaign around a universal basic income deserves note.
Those of you who know me likely know that I’m a big fan of universal basic income (UBI). I wrote my master’s thesis on it, and I genuinely think it’s a 21st century solution to the 21st century issues we face like declining unionization, paternalistic welfare states, and technological automation, while offering a legitimately nonpartisan solution to poverty. What’s refreshing about Yang is that he has done the legwork to become a part of the UBI advocacy community — he acknowledges the work done by leaders in the field, like Karl Widerquist, Rutger Bregman, and Scott Santens (just look at his website’s additional resources section!), and he gave a remote keynote address at the North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress in August this year.
It would be easy for a presidential candidate to take the idea of UBI and not do the research to understand the debates and arguments that came before you, but Yang has managed to spread awareness of UBI the right way, through the right avenues, with the right people influencing his rhetoric. So as a UBI advocate, I’m pleased with how Yang is running his campaign, and the fact that he’s gone from not making Democratic polls in late 2018 to making the debates in September and October shows that his message is landing more than anybody expected at the start of this campaign.
Yang’s core message for the freedom dividend focuses on technological automation. An Oxford University 2013 study by Frey and Osborne estimated that 47% of American jobs are at risk of being automated by machines, largely due to the ability of machines and computers to do the routine, manual work (and even some of the routine, cognitive work) that formed the backbone of the middle class in the 20th century. When so many jobs are at risk, the logical next question is how to mitigate this transition to ensure the people who lose their jobs will be okay. This is Yang’s rallying cry. Truck drivers are the most common job in 29 states, and with self-driving technology advancing quickly, these millions of drivers may soon be out of a job.
In our current capitalist society, it’s easy to picture a world where these people lose their jobs, are not offered wage insurance or retraining, and they fall into poverty as they struggle to find a new job. We need to ensure that all of society benefits from the automation of these jobs so that we do not fear this advancing technology.
Strangely enough, I found supporting arguments for this view in Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. . .
At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.
Of course I disagree with the thievery piece, but otherwise it is striking to see Wilde making relevant arguments in 1891 to the structural problems we face today in 2019. You can draw a direct line from Wilde’s argument about the man owning the machine to the staggering income inequality we see today. The wealthiest in society profit from the work of their employees and from the ‘machines’ or technologies they own to an unnecessary scale.
Wilde admits that this is a Utopian idea. He says, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at. . . Progress is the realization of Utopias.” Wilde’s Utopian ideal of redistribution of wealth during technological advancements pairs well with the Utopias of Thomas More and Edward Bellamy that include a form of UBI as a means of ensuring nobody is left behind in society.
You probably think Yang is a little crazy, but key thinkers throughout history are on his side. In addition to those mentioned above, UBI supporters include Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman, and Bertrand Russell, among others. So while Yang’s candidacy may feel like it came out of nowhere, his key policy did not.
Purple State Progressive 