Andrew-Yang-Jobs

Ever since 2000, Technology has had a devastating impact on the US workforce. Our economy is evolving in ways that is pushing more and more Americans to the side, resulting in economic distress, political and social disintegration. 45% of American jobs are subject to automation, and this is a real problem.

You have to ask yourself, since we are successful at automating away jobs, what are those millions of Americans going to do for work? Our textbooks say, these workers get retrained, and move to find new jobs and opportunities. But what we can see, is that millions of Americans did not find new jobs. They just left the workforce, an exodus of unskilled men. Right now the labor force participation rate in the United States is 63%. How can it be that millions have dropped out of the workforce and our headline unemployment rate is so low? If you
leave the workforce, like these millions of Americans did, you no longer count in the unemployment rate.

Then what happens? How do these people survive if they leave the workforce?

What they do is they file for disability, around 2000 this statistic starts to go up and up and up to the point where now there are more Americans on disability than workers in the construction industry. 20 percent of working-age adults in some parts of the country are on disability, and then they start to kill themselves
in record numbers. The suicide rate among middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the US skyrocket. It has gotten to the point where now America's overall life expectancy has declined for the last three years due to the fact that suicides and drug overdoses have each overtaken vehicle deaths as cause of death for the first time in this nation's history.

Because of the fact that we decimated manufacturing jobs, people who were in those jobs saw no future and started to do drugs and drinking themselves to death.

None of this was in our economics textbooks.

It did not say “hey if you get rid of 4 million manufacturing jobs, they will go home and kill themselves.” This is not what my textbook said, but this is what is happening. So if you look around other parts of the country, and you're confused what's happening, these are the facts.

Another surge is the rate of children in America born to unmarried mothers. 40% of American children are born to unmarried mothers.

If you're a non college educated man in this country, you do not have a secure economic path forward and so you don't think that anyone wants to marry you. If you're a non college educated man in the United States, you have a less than 50% chance of ever being married, but occasionally you have a kid and thus you have this graph.

If you have a little boy growing up to a single mom, it turns out that little boys are more sensitive to parental time input than
little girls. If they don't have a male role model, they start thinking that boys are losers and they're boys so they’re losers. They do badly at school and have behavioral problems and dysfunction at much higher levels .

So this is what's happening in American households around the country. The little boys who grow up in single-parent households are particularly prone to very negative social and educational outcomes. This is going to be with us for a very long time because we are talking about 40% of American boys.

This even extends to our collective mental health. Anxiety, depression, and stress levels are all at record highs in this country.

We are going to do very poorly in a country that is tearing itself apart with truckers rioting and people turning on each other.
This is the mindset of scarcity that is sweeping our country. 78% of people are living paycheck to paycheck. 57% can afford an unexpected $500 bill and so you have to ask ourselves what is the plan moving forward? Who is making this case to the American people?

We're in the midst of the fourth Industrial Revolution, the greatest economic and technological transformation in our nation's history. We need to start solving the problems that are making Americans miserable.

The path of scarcity is where people start competing against each other and start losing their rationality. Financial scarcity, which is happening right now in this country, has a functional impact of decreasing your IQ by thirteen points or one
standard deviation.

So anyone who thinks that America is getting less reasonable and rational and more prone to bad ideas, than you are right. Because if people can't pay their bills, that's exactly what goes on in their minds and in their households.