What WAS Yang 2020?
From video games to overlooking government tech
In summer of 2016 I started meeting UBI enthusiasts through the civic tech world. In 2018 when Andrew Yang wrote “The War on Normal People” and made headlines by saying he was running for president, I ordered a copy and a “universal basic income” T-shirt (it has a colorful bar chart). Everyone knew the campaign was a long shot, but everyone in the /r/basicincome world was excited to see the mission on TV, promoted by a new, younger voice in a field of exhaustingly familiar politicians.
At the end of the 2020 campaign, Yang picked up zero national delegates, appeared briefly in a DNC recap, became a CNN contributor, and moved on to Humanity Forward (non-profit and podcast).
It would be easy for me to say “Yang Gang” and center UBI conversations around the campaign. It would be easy to compare Yang to Buttigieg, who’s also smartly used his campaign to introduce himself to a national audience, secure a TV news contributor position, and maybe get into the Biden administration.
But this doesn’t solve any of the puzzles of Andrew Yang — a candidate inspired by The War on Stupid People, who took his policies on video games and government-funded marriage counseling to the Joe Rogan podcast, and advised the Trump administration on pandemic relief.
What’s in the book?
Andrew Yang said his book was inspired by the Atlantic article “The War on Stupid People”. Elsewhere he joked it might have been titled “We’re Fucked”
As you all know, Yang’s book spells out why declining unemployment figures underestimate our crisis, how AI vehicles will overtake the most popular trucking jobs, and how the recovery since 2008 has not reached most people (what in 2020 we’d call a K-shaped recovery).You probably heard all of this and the solution: a $1,000 / month Freedom Dividend.
The actual book is closer to the “We’re Fucked” title. Yang is not a “learn to code” candidate - he lists multiple government retraining programs which have failed at huge expense. This returns to mind when I hear about programs to retrain coal miners (like this) and got me to rethink my own plans to get into the ‘code school’ industry.
Yang explains why smart young techies, who do have valuable skills, migrate to the same few cities and rarely choose a job in out-of-touch government. There’s a chapter about how young men aren’t getting enough education or full-time jobs and a lengthy explanation that it’s because they play too many hours of video games. We hear about how Brattleboro, Vermont has a Star Trek economy of social credits.
The points were all rooted in true statistics, and help explain why we would choose UBI as the road to recovery. Maybe video gaming addiction was too zany and injection centers too wonkish for a small campaign? Focus on the dividend. But reading this book fresh in 2018, I was puzzling over whether this was the Yang worldview or outreach to religious conservatives. Well….
Pursuing the male political disengagement vote
In December 2018, Yang adapted his chapter on men and video games into an article on Quillette which doesn’t mention UBI at all:
[Tyler Cowen] projects a future where a relative handful of high-productivity individuals create most of the value, while low-skilled people become preoccupied with cheap digital entertainment to stay happy and organize their lives.
Also:
A number of my guy friends have gotten divorced in their thirties and forties. Others have become detached from society. Male dysfunction tends to take on an air of nihilism and dropping out. The world and relationships take work.
The Yang campaign did mostly hold true to conservative points. His website famously had 155 policies, with a section on “Family/Social Cohesion” including “Free Marriage Counseling for All” and tech addiction.
What bothers me about this isn’t that marriage counseling is bad or that video games are awesome, but the idea of a presidency invested in personal issues. If you listen to Kanye West talk about his campaign, for example, he has legitimate issues with the recording industry, he wants a corporate board seat, he wants to train choir singers, but none of these are presidential concerns.
Luckily, the video games point didn’t stick around long.
In August 2019, Yang agreed on the H3H3 podcast that video games don’t cause mass shootings, and didn’t bring up addiction. He underlines his campaign message about the familiar path to success being lost.
In 2020 he’s still upbeat about video games:
In April 2019, Yang appeared on Ben Shapiro’s podcast.
Yang was also one of the candidates to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast, despite complaints about the podcast being part of ‘the manosphere’ or ‘the intellectual dark web’. (Others: Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Kanye West — and Marianne Williamson asked). The Rogan political message is something like, this fucking government, amirite, which Yang is willing to play into, even though his and Sanders’s policies would add unprecedented dollars and personnel to the federal government.
Whatever the goal was for the podcast tour, FiveThirtyEight reported that 70 percent of Yang’s campaign donations came from men, comparable only to Tulsi Gabbard.
Someone should put code in government
Andrew Yang wasn’t accepted by voters as a presidential candidate, but he did gain an authority in one space: the need to modernize government. Let’s get some Silicon Valley geniuses in DC! A sample message in May 2020:
This is a pet peeve for many people in the civic tech industry, from Code for America to state-level institutions to 18F and USDS. For the uninitiated: we do have technologists and web designers in government. Matt Cutts was already famous in tech circles for his work on Google Search and Gmail, before becoming the Administrator of USDS, and advocates for Silicon Valley coders to take ‘a tour of duty’ in the government. And we’re on our fourth ‘White House CTO’ after Obama created that position in 2009.
Andrew Yang knows these people and groups. They are not obscure in the tech world, much less the gov+tech world. In September 2020 Ezra Klein mentioned 18F and procurement, 73 minutes into a Vox interview and Yang replies, saying USDS is too small (180 people, should be 10x or 20x), not empowered enough, and should have a West Coast base [18F is already a remote-first office].
I can’t escape the feeling that the public statements are to get people angry, to pull on real frustrations with misleading information. Why else would Andrew Yang and Humanity Forward avoid using their platform to interview and assess an agency or a tech nonprofit, and the actual gaps in support that they’re facing? If we see Yang as NYC mayor, or in a Biden administration, I expect him to create a totally new tech policy office where he can own it, can create it, unfortunately at the expense of our existing networks.
I hate it here (in the Democratic party)
Despite a Yang campaign promise to protect normal people, like truckers and waitresses, from the oncoming train of despair, few were convinced. Here Yang describes them “flinching” after hearing he was a Democrat:
I can understand why the middle America economy is central to Andrew Yang’s message going forward — if the economy falters, he comes off as prescient. Also, if you were following political Twitter in 2019, the conservative plan was to challenge Democrats on LGBT equality and health coverage for non-citizens. Admittedly Democratic candidates’ support for these is recent, and not unified. It takes only a few percent of likely voters staying home to tilt the balance.
But I don’t want to hear about focus from the guy who had circumcision as one of the recurring policies in interviews.
A fair retrospective on the 2020 campaign would ask, how did Bloomberg bring in 2.5 million votes (more than Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Gabbard, and Yang combined)? In a world where we can’t agree if Sanders’s support was diverse enough to beat Trump, what future does Yang Gang have?
Do people understand what the ACA is, how it has affected them positively, and that it’s in front of the Supreme Court right now?
Anyway,
no one really speaks for Democratic voters as a whole,
opinions are my own,
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Consider working for USDS, 18F, or your state’s digital innovation agency or check the Public Interest Tech Job Board.
