Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Oh. The next chapter seems to be about himself.

His parents were from Taiwan; he was one of the only Asians in his local public school, and the other kids teased him. "I started wondering if I did indeed have a small dick."

The insinuation that he might made him "very, very angry."

(What could go wrong if we add a bit of Blut und Eisen to this sensibility?)

He founded an Internet company when he was 25; it went bust; he worked at a medical records software company,

then became CEO of a GMAT prep company. By 2010, the company had been acquired for millions, he was living in New York among family and friends, and was engaged to be married.

"And yet, something bothered me that I couldn't let go."

The young people he was training "seemed to be searching for some higher purpose that eluded them."

"I became fixated on the idea of training hundreds of enterprising college grads and sending them to startup companies in other US cities to promote job growth and innovation in regions across the country." He quit his job to start Venture for America.

It was, he writes, extremely successful. People sought out his advice on innovation and entrepreneurship. He married his wife, and had two sons. "Being a parent is much harder than I ever thought it would be but it brings its own sense of fulfillment."

"And yet in 2016 something started bothering me--a feeling I couldn't seem to shake."

As he crisscrossed the country, looking at long-term decay, he began to think the message of entrepreneurialism he was peddling was a crock.

Manhattan and Silicon Valley seemed to be different countries. "It was less the buildings and surroundings and more the people. They seemed despondent and depressed, like their horizons had been lowered to simply scraping by."

When he went to high-level conferences, his colleagues would confide in him that none of this was going to solve the problem.

"People were clapping us on the back, congratulating us, and we were thinking to ourselves, 'What are you congratulating us for? The problems are just getting worse.'"

He became plagued by two questions:

"What the heck is happening to the United States," and "Why am I becoming such a tool?"

He started researching trends in the labor market.

"Donald Trump's election on late 2016 heightened my sense of urgency; it felt like a cry for help."

What he found "shocked me and verified my experiences on the road." The US, he writes, is starting 100,000 fewer business per year than it was 12 years ago and "shedding millions of jobs due primarily to technological advancement."

Here's the only source he offers for the above: fastcompany.com/40425393/is-th… In turn, it links to this report: eig.org/wp-content/upl…

That report--the last one--doesn't support Yang's chief claim. It concludes, "Fundamentally, we don’t know what caused the long-term, steady decline in firm formation, nor have we come close to a satisfactory explanation for the nearer-term collapse."

"I remember the moment it finally sank in completely," he writes. He was reading an article on CNN that "detailed how automation had eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2015, four times more than globalization."

"I knew what my friends were working on and what was coming down the road. As I felt the pieces fall into place, my heart sank and my mind raced. Nothing will stop us."

"We had decimated the economies and cultures of these regions and we were set to do the same to many others."

"I'm about to lose--we're all about to lose--on an epic scale."

"The market will not help us. Indeed, it's about to turn on us. The solutions aren't beyond us yet, but it's getting late in the day and time is running short. I need you to see what I see."

The chapter ends without him actually making an argument or offering evidence for his claim. But it certainly ends on a suspenseful note.

One thing I feel confident in saying: I so far wouldn't favor giving all the power to Andrew Yang.