The War on Normal People summary

When it comes to addressing the impending crisis of mass unemployment, many economists look to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century as a model. They claim that in the future economy – which we haven’t even imagined yet – new jobs will materialize, just as they did in the Industrial Revolution.

Not only does this notion overlook the comparative sophistication of new technologies to the combustion engine or other Industrial-era inventions, it also fails to acknowledge that, despite its great technological leaps forward, the Industrial Revolution was a time of significant turbulence. The reality is that job loss has an effect that ripples through society.

Losing your job doesn’t have to be catastrophic, right? After all, as recently as September 2017, the unemployment rate was only 4.2 percent, so new jobs must be readily available. 

Well, some facts suggest otherwise. The unemployment rate doesn’t account for people who have given up on finding a job altogether. And a 2012 Department of Labor survey found that, of the five million workers displaced from manufacturing jobs since 2000, 41 percent were either still unemployed or had dropped out of the labor market entirely.

As normal Americans experience marginalization without prospects for future employment, wealth in America is becoming increasingly concentrated. The majority of high-achieving graduates from top universities are moving to a handful of cities, including New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. With educated people leaving their hometowns behind in pursuit of status and high-paying jobs, top talent is effectively pulled away from the rest of the country, as the income equality between these cities and everywhere else deepens.

Given that income inequality is a product of market-driven capitalism, Yang fears that growing discontentment and desperation might lead to widespread upheaval. For example, frustrated truckers and unionized Teamsters – legendary for their aggression in the 1950s – could trigger mass protests and nationwide havoc if they are laid off when self-driving vehicles become available. Inspired by social media, truckers across the country might gather and block highways. This could inspire the support of white nationalist groups and anti-government militias, spiraling into violent conflict while hundreds of thousands refuse to pay their taxes.

If you’ve been thinking that this vision of America sounds particularly bleak, you’ll be relieved to hear the author’s solutions. At heart, Yang is an optimist and believes that there’s still time to change the fate of America, as long as the federal government takes action.

The first solution that Yang proposes is the implementation of a universal basic income, or UBI, which Yang calls the Freedom Dividend. This dividend would allot each American between the ages of 18 and 64 an annual income of $12,000 regardless of their work status or income. The dividend would be indexed to rise with inflation and, since the poverty line is $11,770, would effectively raise Americans out of poverty en masse.

Skeptics often dismiss the idea on the basis that people will be irresponsible with the money, arguing that UBI will squander incentives to work and that people will waste the money on drugs and alcohol. While it might be reasonable to believe that some people will stop working, when it comes to how people handle the extra cash, real-world examples of guaranteed income paint a different picture.

In 1974, the Canadian government spent $56 million on monthly checks to raise everyone in Dauphin – a 13,000-person town in the province of Manitoba – above the poverty line. The program was discontinued when a conservative government came to power four years later. In 2005, an economist at the University of Manitoba, Evelyn Forget, analyzed the results. What she found was that the only groups of people who worked less during the program were new mothers and teenagers. At the same time, birth rates decreased for women under 25, high school graduation rates increased, and hospital visits were reduced by 8.5 percent.

Between 2002 and 2005, while working as head of client engagement at a New York-based health software start-up that digitized paper medical records, Yang noticed how reluctant doctors were to financially back the new technology. In part, this was because high-earning surgeons were uninterested in investing their profits.

Yang’s observations reflect how, in spite of new technologies, American healthcare providers continue to put profits before the interests of patients. By 2016, healthcare costs had risen to account for 17.8 percent of the economy, with the United States spending around twice as much per capita on healthcare as other industrialized countries. At the same time, US healthcare ranks lower than all other major industrialized nations in equity, efficiency, and health outcomes. What’s more, for many Americans, unpredictable costs often result in high bills, leaving people with a financial burden at a time when they’re least equipped to deal with it. 

Yang’s healthcare reform ideas are a testament to his belief that UBI is not an end-all solution; rather, it’s just the first step toward what he calls human capitalism. Unlike our system of market-driven capitalism that values money, human capitalism would be a system that values humanity and uses markets to serve our common goals and values.

To institute human capitalism, the government would begin holding companies accountable for abusing the market for financial gain and against humanity’s interests. Yang proposes that the government could create a law, a Public Protection Against Market Abuse Act, which would require a company’s CEO and largest individual shareholder to spend one month in jail for every $100 million fined by the Justice Department or accrued in federal bailout costs.