Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has centered his campaign around the impact of workers losing jobs to technology. Yang has written that a wave of automation and the resulting job loss is “well under way” and has produced “a growing mass of the permanently displaced.” Yang says that “The marketplace is about to turn on us in epoch, catastrophic fashion,” and he poses the question: “Are we so far gone as a country that we are not even reckoning with the fundamentals that are devastating our communities?”
As a first step toward a solution, he has proposed a universal basic income (UBI), where the government would offer every adult in the country $1,000 a month to help them cover basic needs while they relocate, train for new jobs, or do work such as raising children. The UBI would be funded by a tax on those companies that benefit the most from the new technology. Yang says he sees this UBI as a way of stabilizing the economy and people’s lives so that our society can be reorganized around what he calls a “human-centered capitalism.” His campaign slogan is “Humanity First.”
While Yang wants to hang on to a system that is dominated by corporations, he has squarely confronted the central issue of our time, which is the impact of labor-replacing technology on people’s lives under the existing system. His message that we need to measure our society’s success not just by production and profits, but by the well-being and happiness of our people, is a powerful one, and it opens the door to provocative discussions and ideas for transforming society.
Introducing a universal basic income could help begin reversing the destruction of lives that we see going on today. And the discussion around Yang’s ideas could be a starting point for resolving the bigger problem, which is how do we wrestle our society away from the corporations so that we can use the abundance technology can produce to truly put humanity first?
I agree with Yang that we needs a society that puts humanity first. But I disagree that Capitalism can be modified to accomplish this end.
My reading of economics 101, that describes the laws of capitalism, tells me there is no such thing as a “more humanistic capitalism”.
Yang, a dedicated capitalist, is really sending a message to his fellow capitalists, who have so far ignored the dominant role of of technology in disrupting the productive relations, the engine driving the economy. Either provide a pittance to the working class or they will out right revolt, threatening to take our private property, turning it into public property.