The War on Normal People: The Truth about America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

Abstract

in Paris and resuming a normal life had thus become a challenge. Overall, Le Lambeau is a fascinating and often sobering read, one that offers insight into human fragility as well as resilience. One caveat in terms of style: like many French journalists/novelists, Lançon feels the need to insert as many literary references as possible into his narrative, with results that are often more rambling than Proustian . Some judicious editing would have eliminated a few of the unnecessary digressions and provided a sharper, clearer focus. It should be noted that two other survivors of the terrorist attack have published bandes dessinées or graphic albums: Catharsis, by Luz (Futuropolis, 2015), and La légèreté, by Catherine Meurisse (Dargaud, 2016). Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Andrew Yang The War on Normal People: The Truth about America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future New York. Hachette. 2018. 284 pages. The case for universal basic income (UBI)—whereby the state makes regular, unconditional income payments to all its working-age citizens—is gaining increasing traction in the United States. Though the concept of UBI is nothing new to American politics, it has acquired renewed relevance in the face of a pressing modern issue: the automation of jobs. Andrew Yang makes one of the more noteworthy arguments in favor of UBI in his urgent new book, The War on Normal People. Yang is clearly a man of action. He is the founder of Venture for America and has recently filed for candidacy in the 2020 US presidential elections. With The War on Normal People, he not only draws attention to current socioeconomic issues but goes on to proposes concrete measures to face them. Yang uses the word “normal ” in the sense of “average” but reminds his readers that the “average” falls lower than they might think. As Yang points out, “the normal American did not graduate from college and doesn’t have an associate ’s degree. He or she perhaps attended college for one year or graduated high school [and] has a net worth of . . . about $6K excluding home and vehicle equity.” It is these “normal” Americans for whom the consequences of shifting from human to machine labor have been and will be most dire. Although “automation [has already] eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2015,” Yang believes that the bulk of its impact is yet to come: “I love capitalism[, but] capitalism with the assistance of technology is about to turn on normal people.” However, to think that high-qualification white-collar jobs are immune to this change would be mistaken. The key criterion for the automation of a profession is the extent to which that profession is repetitive or routine, not the extent to which it is manual. Considering that the Federal Reserve classifies almost half of current US jobs as “routine,” Yang contends that the potential impact of continued automation is serious indeed. Yang sees as misguided in the current context the claim that technological revolutions always compensated loss of certain professions by the creation of new fields of employment. A number of specific manual professions becoming obsolete does not compare in quality or impact to any (including any new) routine work being lost to human employment. “History repeats itself until it doesn’t,” he cautions. As a solution to the socioeconomic vulnerability that would result from increasing automation, Yang proposes to pay a universal basic income, whereby each working-age adult is to receive a “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 a month, which roughly hits the current national poverty line. To gauge the impact of his proposal, he lists a multitude of current and historical UBI experiments (from Alaska and Finland to UBI aid payments in Kenya), which seem to all offer similarly positive conclusions. For instance, in the Canadian town of Dauphin, thirteen thousand people received a four-year UBI, lifting everyone above the poverty line, with researchers finding “minimal effect on work. The only groups who worked substantially less were new mothers and teenagers. . . . Birth rates for women under twenty-five dropped. High school graduation rates went up . . . hospital visits went World Literature in Review 94 WLT NOVEMBER...