Making Sense with Sam Harris - #130 — Universal Basic Income

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with presidential candidate Andrew Yang about "universal basic income" (UBI). They discuss the state of the economy, the rise of automation and AI, the arguments for and against UBI, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Andrew Yang. Andrew has been a CEO and co-founder and executive of several technology and education companies. And this year he announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in 2020. And the central plank to his platform is universal basic income.

Now, many people have been asking that I do a podcast on this topic, and Andrew does a fantastic job representing it, and he is running for president, so that obviously adds interest as well. And he has a book titled The War on Normal People, which we talk about in this episode. And we really cover every related matter here. We talk about what UBI is, the principal arguments against it, whether it would be difficult to implement or not, what its likely consequences would be. This is a good tour of the issue, and I don't think this issue is going away. So now, without further delay, I bring you Andrew Yang. I am here with Andrew Yang. Andrew, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, Sam. So I will have properly introduced you in my intro here, but briefly, you have written a very interesting book titled The War on Normal People, which is your case for universal basic income, which we'll be talking about in this podcast. I've had many requests to cover this topic, and you cover it so well in your book and so urgently. So that, I'm sure, will be the topic of conversation. But you also happen to be running for the presidency of the

United States in 2020, and that is an extraordinarily novel thing to be doing. Before we get into UBI, how is it that you come to be running for the presidency? And how does one even think about making that decision? Because I think it must seem like an incredibly quixotic thing to attempt, even if someone already has a huge national platform, which I suspect you don't yet. Give us your background and how you come to find yourself in this position. Sure. So I'm a serial entrepreneur. I ran a national education company that helped people get into business school. And I personally taught the analyst classes at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, JP Morgan. I saw all of these smart, energetic young people who hated their jobs and

didn't know why they were doing what they were doing. So then when my company was acquired by the Washington Post in 2009, I thought about the problems of the world. And the biggest problem to me at the time was that we had so much talent doing things that were not going to drive our society forward in meaningful ways. They were going to become investment bankers, management consultants, corporate lawyers like I was for five months. And that wasn't going to be what we needed. So I started a nonprofit called Venture for America to help create businesses around the country and channel our talented young people to environments like Detroit or Baltimore and New Orleans or St. Louis to help rejuvenate regional economies. And so I saw a lot of the country. I think you're from the West Coast.

I'm from the East Coast. I had never been to Detroit or Cleveland or St. Louis or these places before starting Venture for America. And our goal was to create American jobs, which we did. We've helped create about 3,000 jobs to date. But I was in my role as founder and CEO of Venture for America for six and a half years. And the more I saw, the more I realized that our economy has changed for good, that we're automating away so many jobs. So imagine, Sam, if it was your job to create jobs, and then you

realize at a certain point that you were pouring water into a bathtub that had a giant hole ripped in the bottom. And so from there, I went on a quest to figure out what the heck you do about the hole in the bottom of the bathtub, and then concluded that a universal basic income was the most realistic and efficient solution that one could implement in a reasonable timeframe, essentially before the truck drivers get sent home, which is going to be a massive problem. And I'm sure we'll talk about that. And so then when you go to the drawing board and you say, hey, how am I going to get universal basic income across the finish line and make it a reality in the five to 10 years we have before the truckers jobs get automated,

then running for president becomes really the only logical thing to do if you're trying to solve a problem. And that's what I do as an entrepreneur is like you see a problem, you try and solve for it. So this to me was the clearest path. And how would you describe yourself politically? You know, I suspect you and I are kind of similar, that I've traditionally been very democratic leaning. I consider myself something of an independent at this point, though I line up with Democrats and liberals on most social priorities. I think economically, I'm like many entrepreneurs where I feel like

there are a lot of things that you need private industry to tackle. And I am concerned about the fact that the government is not excellent at a lot of things that we wish it were excellent at. You've written this incredibly urgent book about universal basic income, also known as UBI. The case you make for the kind of economic emergency that is coming upon us is pretty dire, and we'll kind of run through your analysis. But what is, let's just define UBI for those who haven't heard of the concept. It's actually a fairly old idea. I wasn't aware that it was as old as you discuss it to be in the book.

What is universal basic income? Well, universal basic income is a policy where every citizen of a country gets a certain amount of money from the government, no questions asked, every period, essentially every month. And as you say, Thomas Paine advocated for it way back in the day at the founding of the country. And it's been baked into our country's DNA for decades, where Martin Luther King was for it, Milton Friedman was for it, Friedrich Hayek was for it,

Richard Nixon was for it. It even passed the House of Representatives in 1971, and then stalled in the Senate because of Democrats that wanted a higher income threshold than was being proposed. But 1,000 economists signed a letter in the 60s saying this would be great for the economy and society. It's a policy where everyone gets a certain amount of money to meet basic needs every month. There's something you tackle early in the book. I want to just get into the ethics here because I think there's a very strong bias, especially among conservatives, but it's a bias that I seem to encounter everywhere against this idea of giving everyone

this free handout. And it's tied to this notion that there's some kind of work ethic that will be undermined here, and we'll talk about the objections to it, but there's this, I guess what I would call the illusion of a meritocracy that you deal with early in the book. And at one point you say, and this is a quote, the logic of meritocracy is driving us to ruin. And then you go on to talk about how it's leading to this assumption that if someone isn't succeeding in today's economy, it's their fault, right? So the blame is on the person who is still poor, given all the opportunity that is available. And it ignores the fact that some people are simply luckier than others across every variable that is open to difference that people aren't responsible for. So you describe your own background.

You talk about how your academic success was almost entirely the result of you being smart and good at taking tests. And these are not qualities about you that you created in yourself. And they're not the result of hard work, and they're not the result of character. And I would argue, if you know anything about my views on free will, I would say that a person's capacity for hard work and their character is also not something that they create. That's the last trench in which the people for the meritocracy are fighting. But these dominoes, I think, should fall pretty quickly. I mean, how much can we blame someone who isn't as smart or happens to be bad at taking tests for not being able to fully capitulate the success you have found in your own life?

And of course, as you discuss in the book, the differences don't end there. There are people who have two parents. There are people who have one. There are people who have none. Some people and their families enjoy perfect health, some just get absolutely devastated by the bad luck of illness and injury. We know that all of these stresses and the kinds of scarcity associated with them are bad for people. They're bad, they compete for cognitive bandwidth, as you describe at some length in the book. So let's talk about the ethics of the situation and the kinds of resistance you get to the idea based on a sense that it's just simply wrong to hand out money to people. Well, one of the points I make is that it's not as if the truck drivers are about to get dumber and lazier overnight. It's just that their trucks are going to start driving themselves. It has nothing to do with their character and work ethic. It doesn't matter

if they're a good truck driver or a bad truck driver, particularly. It's just that we can save $168 billion if we automate their jobs and probably thousands of lives because that's how many people die every year. So it works on both sides of the dimensions, as you point out. Like, I certainly attribute most of my success through my early years just to the fact I was really good at filling out bubbles on Scantron sheets. And the opposite is true for other people, where if you were not good at qualities that are academic system prizes, then you'll be increasingly marginalized and beaten down and told that you should know, you should think about like a second rate or third tier like way of life for yourself. And that's what's appropriate.

So the logic of the meritocracy is about to, well, it's breaking down around us because people are catching on. But more than that, right now we rely upon the marketplace to assign and attribute certain values to people's time. And one of the references I made to a group I spoke to last week was that you can have a radiologist who spent a dozen years in education, hundreds of thousand dollars worth of training, spent 10 years becoming excellent at detecting tumors on films. And then tomorrow, or literally right now, a computer is going to be a lot better at that than that radiologist because it can see shades of gray that the human eye can't detect. And it can reference millions of films instead of hundreds or thousands. So the crudeness of the market as an effective allocator of value to our time is about to be exposed to people.

And so we have to evolve to the next form of capitalism as quickly as possible, or else we're going to find ourselves in almost unimaginable circumstances very, very soon. Yeah, so this market failure to value time is a huge problem. And I think at some point in the book, you list all of the things that are important to us, obviously important to us, that the market currently doesn't capture or capture well. And that includes things like the environment, includes teaching and childcare, it even includes journalism. And I would argue that it includes digital content almost in its entirety. I mean, just the way we have failed to fund quality online, and we're now beholden to this advertising model that is incentivizing all the wrong things and driving us mad on social media. All of these are market failures. And as you point out, we're not only talking about blue-collar

jobs, we're talking about white-collar jobs and traditionally high-prestige jobs, like, as you say, a radiologist or doctors across the board. We could argue that the profession of nursing is more secure than the profession of oncology with respect to coming advances in AI. So there's kind of this barbell picture of very low-end, low-prestige, low-compensation service jobs and super high-end creative jobs that will be most likely spared, certainly in any near-term time frame. But in the middle, you basically have everything from many service jobs and basically any job that has a significantly repetitive routine characteristic. And I think at one point, I think it was McKinsey that said that 73% of food

prep jobs can be automated. And the Federal Reserve categorized 44% of all jobs as routine and susceptible to automation. This is kind of a coming apocalypse for jobs that is, again, it can happen very, very quickly. I mean, the radiology one is super poignant, because it's just the next software update could achieve just the perfect cancellation of that kind of job. Yeah. And one of the most shocking things I uncovered in researching for the book was that this is no longer speculative. We're in the middle of it. And we're dealing with it in the worst way possible, which is by ignoring it and pretending it's not happening. Where if you look at our labor force participation rate today, it's down to 62.7 percent, which is a multi-decade low and the same levels as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.

Our life expectancy has declined for the last two years because middle-aged Americans are killing themselves in record numbers where seven people die of opiates every hour. And the disability rate is climbing to a point where now there are more Americans on disability than work in construction. When I tried to find out what happened to the manufacturing workers that lost their jobs in the Midwest, it turns out that almost half of them just left the workforce entirely. And then of that group, about half went on disability. So I studied economics in college. And what classical economics says would happen is completely not happening if you actually dig into the numbers and the facts. So this is no longer something we can look ahead to and say, what are we going to do? This is ripping our society apart. The reason why Donald Trump is our president today is because of the spreading dysfunction. And right now, the country is locked in the struggle between functioning and dysfunction,

reason and unreason, and scarcity and abundance. And scarcity is winning. And that's what we have to reverse through universal basic income. It's our best way forward. So I want to talk more about just what this would mean and how it could be implemented and what the likely effects would be. But I want to deal with one objection up front, because there's this kind of free market fundamentalism that one runs into, especially in Silicon Valley at the moment. There's a lot of libertarians in Silicon Valley. And actually, I was at lunch with some people, and one of the people included a very successful entrepreneur and VC now. But we were talking about

UBI, and I told him I was going to have you on the podcast, and then he sent me an email, an incredibly generous, detailed email offering reasons to doubt this whole premise, and many of them you will have heard before, but it was very comprehensive, and I won't read the whole email, but I just want to get at what was his central concerns here, just want to get at what was his central concerns here, because I've heard them many times, and no doubt you have, and I think this is the kind of the first objection that you just have to figure out how to ram through if you're going to get people to take UBI seriously. And so it's this notion, which you've just expressed, that it really is different this time, because we have obviously lived in a world for at least 150 years or so where we have noticed this effect of breakthroughs in technology where something comes online and

it destroys jobs. We find new efficiencies in some labor process and people can't envision what the replacement jobs will be. And so there's kind of this Luddite delusion. And what we're saying, what you're saying certainly, is that this time is different. But some would argue here is that, one, this is a failure of imagination. You could have gotten into a time machine and stood with the Luddites and shared their delusion and not seen what jobs would come in the wake of all the jobs that were being destroyed. There's this conviction that there will always be things for people to do. There will be jobs as long as there's anything in this world that people want. You know, I find this line of reasoning just so lazy and ridiculous and frustrating where otherwise educated people will actually cite the Industrial Revolution and say, but look, 120 years ago, we went through something similar. And that's actually the argument. But saying that there will always be jobs as long as there are needs fails to take into account how the market values human labor. It's like if a factory disintegrates in Michigan and then there are

thousands of people out of work and don't have the money to somehow relocate to San Francisco or someplace where the... And if they did, there'd be no way for them to actually manage the cost of living. I spent the last six and a half years walking the Midwest and the South and other places. And it's, yeah, just like that kind of ideological oversimplification just ignores realities on the ground. Like no one actually goes and hangs out. That was actually part of the picture he sketched here. He thinks the onus is really on the difficulty that people find moving to new centers of growth and the zoning restrictions that make it so costly to bring on new people in cities like San Francisco where the boom is happening. He thinks that if we want to help

people, we have to make it easier for them to move, but fundamentally not treat them as liabilities who have to be paid for, but to treat them as assets. Because in his view, people will always be assets. And his counterpoint also does boil down to this, that if we weren't destroying jobs through breakthroughs in technology, that would be synonymous with the lack of material progress. I mean, this is like, this is always the process that has to be hoped for, destroying jobs. And if we're not destroying jobs in the medical sector, there's no way people will be able to afford medical care in the future because there's no way to bring the cost down. So this is, it is this kind of creative destruction picture of finding new efficiencies. But he thinks that the solution would be to just make it as easy as possible for people to relocate and find the new areas of growth. And that's something I'm very much in favor of.

And that was something that universal basic income would help a great deal with. Where if you look at the current rate of interstate relocation in this country, it's also at a multi-decade low. Even as the opportunities are shifting, people are moving less and not more. They're hunkering down. And that's a massive problem. I mean, as president, I would pay for people to move, but giving them universal basic income actually does a lot of the same thing, where we need to make our labor market much more dynamic and mobile. I will say, though, that trying to say, essentially, the market will get it right, and we just need to push everyone to stay market mobile and market competitive,

will break down. I mean, it's already breaking down. And imagining that it's going to be a constant, because as you said, there's going to be massive job polarization, where if you look at the five most common job types in the country, retail and sales, clerical and administrative, food service and food prep, truck driving and transportation and manufacturing, they're all going to shrink immensely. And many of those people will not realistically be able to identify new opportunities. Those five categories I just named are about half of all American jobs.

And most of those people have high school educations. The median truck driver is 49 years old, 94% male. The median retail worker is 39, majority female, about 60%. So we're talking about people who are working at 12, 14, $15 an hour jobs, and then having those jobs disappear. It would help if they could magically move to another part of the country, it would help a great deal. But it's a multifaceted problem that's very deep and human. So yeah, let's tackle this, the poster issue here of trucking, because he actually sent me an article, you might have seen this article in The Atlantic that

offers a counterpoint to this fear. There have been many studies that suggest that, as you said, trucking will be one of the first jobs and one of the most consequential to be decimated by automation. But this Atlantic article, I think citing a study that was somewhat curiously funded by Uber, that doesn't automatically disqualify it, but I guess we should add a few grains of salt. It suggested that not only will trucking jobs not be hurt, but there in fact might be more people working in that industry because the cost of freight will go down and there'll be more demand. And for the longest time, it will be impossible to automate the final mile so that you'll still need a person in a truck, you know,

who will be better rested and will be able to do many other things, but who will have to navigate that final mile into a crowded city. And many of the other effects that people worry about, like tiny towns being bypassed by now sleeping truck drivers, their economies will be affected. But what do you say to this notion that this fear is fundamentally incorrect, that no matter how much we automate trucking, there will still be other jobs, and even that the very same truckers would be doing, because we're just not actually picturing how much truckers do apart from pushing the pedals and steering the wheel on a truck.

Well, to me, the truth is in the numbers, where if you see the number of truck drivers in this country, it's going to be the half of the world. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. you