The War on Normal People Book Summary - The War on Normal People Book explained in key points

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The War on Normal People summary

Name: The War on Normal People
Rating: 4.5 (134 reviews)
Author: Andrew Yang

Andrew Yang

The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

4.5 (134 ratings)

24 mins

Topics

US Economics

Table of Contents

The War on Normal People
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What’s in it for me? Consider Andrew Yang’s radical plan for the future of America.

As the founder of Venture for America – a nonprofit organization focusing on training entrepreneurs and creating jobs in American cities – Andrew Yang often traveled to cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, and New Orleans. He noticed that in contrast to the successful people in his Manhattan and Silicon Valley bubbles, average Americans are facing major difficulties accessing healthcare and education, while many communities are struggling with issues related to drug addiction. On top of this, he realized that our economy is on the brink of a mass unemployment crisis driven by unprecedented technological advances.

In these blinks, you’ll learn about the reality that most Americans are facing today and what it will take to create an economy that creates hope for everyone.

Along the way, you’ll find out

how Richard Nixon was behind a failed plan for a guaranteed income in the 1970s;
why empty malls lead to broken cities; and
why a capitalism that values humans doesn’t need to be utopian thinking.

Advances in technology and market-driven capitalism have left America on the brink of mass unemployment.

Think about your five closest friends. Did they all go to college? If so, chances are you’re part of a privileged socioeconomic group. For most in the United States, not finishing college is more the norm. In fact, based on a random sampling of Americans, the likelihood that all five of your closest friends finished college is about 0.3 percent.

In contrast to the educated class, average Americans tend to live from paycheck-to-paycheck. And while our system of market-driven capitalism has raised the standard of living for many, giving us widely-enjoyed technology like smartphones, this system doesn’t value the lives of most people. Instead, it values efficiency and cost-cutting measures that enable the market to perform better.

According to Yang, things are about to get a lot worse. Market-driven capitalism has propelled unprecedented advances in technology – including artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics – which are beginning to eliminate jobs by the millions. Currently, a whopping 95 million working-age Americans aren’t in the workforce, making the US labor force participation rate lower than almost every industrialized economy.

Yang calls this phenomenon the Great Displacement. And unlike many economic situations, it’s one that the market isn’t set up to solve. According to a report published by the Obama administration in 2016, 83 percent of jobs that pay less than $20 per hour could face automation or replacement.

This displacement has already begun – since 2000, automation has eliminated an estimated five million American manufacturing jobs. With the advent of self-driving vehicles, a projected two to three million car, bus, and truck drivers will lose their jobs in the next 10 to 15 years. Factory workers, cashiers, customer service representatives, and fast-food chain employees will also soon suffer the consequences of automation.

With today’s technology, even therapy and drawing are skills that can be automated. Even if white-collar workers such as paralegals and wealth managers are also forced to find new work in the coming years, low-income earners without a college degree or other skills will inevitably be the least able to find new work prospects.

Job losses lead to broken cities, broken communities, and broken families.

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.

A mind-set of scarcity has caused many desperate Americans to apply for disability insurance.

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.

Income inequality in the United States could lead to political upheaval.

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.

The idea for a universal basic income is neither new nor impossible to finance.

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.

Universal basic income will alleviate poverty while boosting the economy.

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.

Successful healthcare reform will require transforming the incentives of healthcare providers.

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.

The government should pioneer a human-centered form of capitalism and help citizens find value in the automated era.

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.

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What is The War on Normal People about?

The War on Normal People (2018) reveals how America is on the brink of economic and social collapse due to technological advances such as automation and artificial intelligence. Painting a portrait of the reality that average Americans will increasingly face if mass unemployment is left unaddressed, author Andrew Yang proposes a vision to transform the economy by adopting a human-centered form of capitalism that begins with a universal basic income.

Best quote from The War on Normal People

After one gets on disability, one enters a permanent shadow class of beneficiaries.

—Andrew Yang

Who should read The War on Normal People?

Voters interested in learning about Andrew Yang’s ideas for America
Educated Americans who want to take on income inequality
Working-age people curious about the benefits of a universal basic income

About the Author

Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur, lawyer, philanthropist, author, and Democratic candidate in the 2020 United States presidential election. After helping to develop several companies and start-ups, Yang began Venture for America, a nonprofit organization focused on creating jobs throughout the United States.

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