Thread by @Noahpinion

1/So, I read "The War on Normal People", by @AndrewYang.

Here is my review.

2/As always, I'm impressed by Yang's unflappable confidence and deep concern for other human beings. My bullshit detector is pretty strong, and I can tell that Yang honestly wants to help other people. That sort of reflexive altruism is actually pretty rare, I think.

3/Yang isn't shy about discussing his experiences with racism.

Yet getting bullied by white people didn't decrease his drive to help all Americans - including white Americans.

I really respect that.

4/But Yang dealt with the racism and backwardness of homogeneous small-town America the way most of us nerds did: He ran away, to big cities and universities and the tech industry.

That bubble deeply influenced his ideas about how to help those outside of the bubble.

5/Yang is a deep believer in the power and inevitability of technology. Sometimes this belief goes *too* deep.

6/From within the bubble, Yang analyzes the life of the poor and working class. And he gets a lot of the broad stuff, the conceptual stuff, very right.

For example, he understands how expensive it is to be poor.

7/Yang takes his ideas from many sources that I also get my ideas from. For example, @m_sendhil's work on poverty:

8/But there is a limitation to how deeply one can understand poor and working class America without living there. This is a shortcoming that applies to my writing too, of course.

9/And it's not like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren lives among the poor or working class either. You don't have to be from the working class to want to help them.

But all the same, the tech industry mindset can strike some people as if they're being talked down to...

10/The biggest shortcoming of Yang's book is that he frames UBI as a lifeline for working class and poor people who are about to become obsolete - useless as workers, with no other option but to go on the dole forever.

11/Now, there are many other good arguments for UBI, and Yang mentions all of them. He is not monomaniacally focused on the "rise of the robots" rationale. He has done his homework.

12/Yang also recognizes normal people's need for dignity and a sense of purpose.

But his ideas for how dignity and purpose might be achieved in an age of technological obsolescence are...um...fairly speculative.

13/Now, maybe half of humanity will be rendered unemployable by robots, and UBI will be their only lifeline. But a deeper understanding of the lives and culture of the working class would help craft more realistic ideas for maintaining dignity and purpose in such a world.

14/So while I appreciate Yang's deep humanitarianism and I like the idea of UBI, I think the presentation and messaging could use some work. I am confident that in the future he will make these adjustments.

15/As an addendum, there is one chapter of the book that stands out from the others -- the chapter entitled "Life in the Bubble", in which Yang details the negative effects that brutal meritocratic competition has had on America's professional/managerial class.

16/Yang clearly knows the life of meritocratic strivers very deeply and intuitively. Anyone who thinks our class system is good for the winners should read this chapter and realize what a Hunger Games type situation we've created.

17/All in all, despite the sense of coming from within the tech-world bubble, this is a very good book - not the standard ghost-written politician pablum at all.

This, for instance, is one of the most genuinely moving passages I have ever read in a nonfiction book:

18/So I definitely recommend this book, even to folks who aren't big Yang fans. At the very least, it will spark a lot of thought.

Yang won't win the presidency in 2020, but I really hope he and his movement stick around.

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amazon.com/War-Normal-Peo…