Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Andrew Yang, "The War on Normal People: The Truth about America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income is Our Future," is divided into three parts comprised of 22 short chapters. 246 pages + 28 pages of endnotes.

I hate endnotes. I want footnotes, at the foot of the page, so I don't have to search for them. But I understand mine's a minority view. In the acknowledgments he writes, "As an entrepreneur, I'm a big fan of borrowing."

That hint apart, he doesn't explicitly say that anyone else wrote any part of the book. He thanks his wife by saying, "You are to mothers what Universal Basic Income is to solutions."

One epigraph is from Stephen Hawking--"the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative, or supervisory jobs remaining."

First line: "I am writing from inside the tech bubble to let you know we are coming for your jobs."

Strong first line, strong opening paragraph describing the way software execs and venture capitalists describe "normal people." (They take as given that they're screwed.)

"The numbers have been telling a story for a while now that we have been ignoring. More and more people of prime working age have been dropping out of the workforce. There's a growing mass of the permanently displaced."

"Automation is accelerating to a point where it will soon threaten our social fabric and way of life."

He calls the phenomenon the "Great Displacement."

I'd like to see a serious--not a soundbite--Yang-Warren debate.

He catalogues the problems we're all struggling to understand: unemployment, underemployment, political hostility, addiction, depression, unstable family formation, the collapse of marriage, overdoses, suicides, half of US households reliant on the government for income--despair.

Warren ascribes this set of problems, chiefly, to billionaire greed and bad bank regulation. Yang blames automation.

(Getting this diagnosis right is obviously important.)

Yang then introduces himself. Good pacing, this is the right place for it. He founded Venture for America, working with startups around the country. He's concluded from this that there's no market solution to the problem; indeed, to the contrary.

"The market will continue to throw millions of people out of the labor force as automation and technology improve." We're headed for complete dystopia.

"There is really only one entity--the federal government--that can realistically reformat society in ways that will prevent large swaths of the country from becoming jobless zones of derelict buildings and broken people."

Nonprofits "will be like bandages on top of an infected wound."

State governments are "hamstrung" by "balanced budget requirements and limited resources."

People in Silicon Valley know this, he writes, which is why they're buying bunkers and escape hatches. His friends, he writes, actually want the government to take their money and distribute it.

But "this would require an active, stable, invigorated, unified federal government willing to make large bets." We instead have "an indebted states rife with infighting, dysfunction, and outdated ideas and bureaucracies from bygone eras,"

along with "a populace that cannot agree on basic facts like vote totals or climate change."

(So, thus far: We need a new form of government and a new population. Failing that, we're hell-bound.)

At this point, I'd usually throw away the book. If someone tells me (in essence) we need to throw out the Constitution, end pluralism, and massively increase the size and power of the federal government to solve a problem,

I'd usually say, "Perhaps we should just live with this problem instead."

But he anticipates this will be my reaction.

All of this might sound "like science fiction to you," he writes,

"But you're reading this with a supercomputer in your pocket (or reading it on the supercomputer itself) and Donald Trump was elected president."

You win on that, Andrew. I'll keep turning the pages.

"The future without jobs," he writes, "will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max."

Then he quotes Bismarck: "If revolution there is to be, let us rather undertake it not undergo it."

I am unsure how I feel about a president who closely studies Bismarck.

"We are already on the edge of dystopia with hundreds of thousands of families and communities being pushed into oblivion," he continues.

Basically, he's saying that capitalism is about to collapse under its own contradictions.

End of chapter.