Date: 2025-08-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017979
US Politics
Andrew Yang
Why Is This Man Running for President? (Update) ... A year ago, nobody was taking Andrew Yang very seriously.
Peter Burgess
A year ago, nobody was taking Andrew Yang very seriously. Now he is America’s favorite entrepre-nerd, with a candidacy that keeps gaining momentum. This episode includes our January 2019 conversation with the leader of the Yang Gang and a fresh interview recorded from the campaign trail in Iowa.
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang waves as he arrives at the 2020 Gun Safety Forum on October 2, 2019. Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Andrew Yang, the long-shot presidential candidate who has now outlasted several prominent contenders in the Democratic primary, is the son of immigrants. He was born in Schenectady, New York; studied economics and political science at Brown; and got a law degree at Columbia. After law school, Yang worked at a prestigious law firm, then a few different startup firms, and then at a test-prep company called Manhattan Prep. Yang eventually became the CEO of that company, walking away with millions after it was sold.
In the American Dream sweepstakes, Yang has been a pretty big winner. But he has also come to believe that for every winner like him, there are thousands of losers. That’s why he’s running for president.
When I first interviewed Yang a year ago, he was relatively unknown. Since then, he and his supporters — the Yang Gang, they call themselves — have been steadily accruing money, attention, and like-minded voters. We caught up with Yang again last week while he was in Cedar Falls, Iowa. He had just made the cut as one of only seven candidates to qualify for the next Democratic debate. The interview below includes material from both of our conversations. Yang tells us what he sees happening in the middle of the country that the coastal elites are missing, what he fears will happen as the problem continues to metastasize, and what he’d do as president to fix America.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Stephen J. Dubner: After you left Manhattan Prep, you started a nonprofit called Venture for America, modeled on Teach for America. Its goal is to persuade young, would-be Wall Streeters to launch startups in places like Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis.
Andrew Yang: Yes, Venture for America takes a recent college graduate, trains them with various business skills, and then sends them to work at a startup or an early stage growth company in Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, Baltimore, a city that could use the talent. Then you work at that startup for two years, helping it grow. At the end of two years, if you want to start your own business, we have an accelerator and a seed fund to help you do so. It’s going to create 100,000 jobs around the country. We’ve helped create over 3,000 jobs to date, and dozens of our alums have started companies, some of which have now raised millions of dollars and generated millions in revenue.
What did you see happening in these cities that made you want to take action?
I’ll describe a company. It had a couple of very bright founders out of Brown University, and they got started in Providence. And the company started to do well, hits its stride, it was doing a couple of million in revenue. And then an investor in Silicon Valley said, “Hey, you guys should come out here, and we’ll invest $10, $20 million in you. But you should really come here.” So the guys said, “Well, I guess we have to take that.” So that company went from 100 employees in Providence, Rhode Island, to zero employees.
And what were you seeing in terms of job creation in those cities, especially jobs that are vulnerable to automation and other new technologies?
My thesis was that if you started a tech company in a place like Detroit, it would create additional jobs in that community that were not necessarily skilled jobs. But what I learned was that these companies, in order to be successful, do not need to hire huge numbers of people. Right now, the way businesses grow is lean and mean. And so they’re not going to hire the thousands of employees that industrial companies used to employ in a place like Detroit or Cleveland or St. Louis.
And it became clear to me that as much as I was excited about and proud of the work I was doing, it felt like I was pouring water into a bathtub that had a giant hole ripped in the bottom. Because we’re blasting away hundreds of thousands of retail jobs, call-center jobs, food-service jobs, eventually truck-driving jobs. And so my army of entrepreneurs — doing incredible work, starting companies that might employ 20, 30, 40 people — was not going to be a difference-maker in the context where that community was going to lose 20, 30, 40,000 retail jobs, call-center jobs, transportation jobs, etc.
We are blasting communities to dust and then pretending like we’re not, and pretending like it’s their fault, and pretending that somehow it’s unreasonable to be upset about your way of life getting destroyed. I’m convinced that the reason why Donald Trump won the presidency is that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri.
It’s been tempting, especially from a political viewpoint, to blame all this job loss on global trade, immigrant labor, and offshoring. But most economists argue that the much larger driver of job loss is technology, and automation in particular. You agree with this diagnosis — but not with the rest of the economic dogma, right?
I studied economics. And according to my economics textbook, those displaced workers would get retrained, reskilled, move for new opportunities, find higher productivity work, the economy would grow. Everyone wins.
So then I said, “Okay, what actually happened to these 4 million manufacturing workers?” And it turns out that almost half of them left the workforce and never worked again. Half of those that left the workforce then filed for disability. There are now more Americans on disability than work in construction — over 20% of working-age adults in some parts of the country. It did not say in my textbook that half of them will leave the workforce, never to be heard from again, half of them will file for disability, and then another significant percentage will start drinking themselves to death, start committing suicide at record levels, get addicted to opiates to a point where now eight Americans die of opiates every hour.
And so when you say, “Am I for automation and artificial intelligence and all these fantastic things?” of course I am. I mean, we might be able to do things like cure cancer or help manage climate change more effectively. But we also have to be real that it is going to displace millions of Americans. People are not infinitely adaptable or resilient or eager to become software engineers.
There’s one idea in particular that you have to address this issue, right?
My first big policy is the Freedom Dividend, a policy where every American over the age of 18 gets $1,000 a month, free and clear, no questions asked. It’s a rebrand of “universal basic income” because it tests much better with Americans with the word “freedom” in it.
That sounds expensive.
So the headline cost of this is $2.4 trillion, which sounds like an awful lot. But if you break it down, the first big thing is to implement a value-added tax, which would harvest the gains from artificial intelligence and big data from the big tech companies that are going to benefit from it the most. We need to join every other industrialized country in the world and pass a value-added tax which would give the public a slice, a sliver of every Amazon transaction, every Google search.
And what’s big policy number two for would-be President Yang?
Number two is digital social credits, which are a new way to reward behaviors that we need more of in society. So right now, the monetary market does not recognize things that we know are crucial to humanity like caregiving and raising children, volunteering in the community, arts and creativity, journalism, environmental sustainability. And so we’re getting less and less of those things because the market does not care about them. What I’m proposing is that we create a new currency that then maps to various activities that we want to see more of.
Now that you are a veteran of American electoral politics at the highest level, let me ask you something. Some people argue that the Democrats and Republicans are essentially a duopoly that colludes to perpetuate their power at the expense of the average voter. How much do you agree with that argument?
The two-party duopoly is a major problem. At this point, more Americans self-identify as independents than either Democrats or Republicans. And as someone who’s gone through the nomination process for a number of months now, it’s easy to see how many, many candidates could not get through this Democratic nominating process because they don’t have a certain background or their ideas don’t fit with the Democratic primary voters who may or may not represent many, many Americans. So I’m for ranked-choice voting, in part so we can have a more robust multiparty system, and [so] Americans won’t fear they’re going to throw their vote away if they vote for anyone that doesn’t have a “D” or “R” next to their name.
Name a position or two of yours that you feel is most at odds with the current Democratic Party.
Unfortunately, I think putting money into people’s hands is at odds with the Democratic Party. There’s a mistrust of people in the Democratic Party that I frankly don’t understand because I feel like people are the point.
I think that over the last number of years, Democrats have become the champions of programs and institutions. The party is more likely to champion something like free college, even though only 33% of us will go to college, than just putting cash into people’s hands. And then the solutions they recommend seem like more layers of government. And I’m concerned that if that’s the primary message, then we may end up losing to Trump yet again in 2020.
So when it comes to the American economy overall, Trump’s first term has been marked by record-low unemployment, record-high stock markets, and at least a slight uptick in wages — all of which is tempered by a lot of trade uncertainty, particularly with China. Still, Trump’s message, whether justified or not, is that the economy is strong and that he had a lot to do with that. So how do you counter that claim? Let’s imagine a debate for a moment.
I would just tell the American people the facts they already know. That we have record-high levels of corporate profits. But also at record highs, in the United States of America right now, are stress, anxiety, mental illness, depression, even suicides, and drug overdoses. Student loan debt, record highs. And so you have to ask, what good are corporate profits if people are literally dying earlier because of surges in suicides and drug overdoses?
And when I go campaigning around the country, I cannot tell you how many heads nod when I talk about how their lived experience has nothing to do with corporate profits, the headline unemployment rate, or GDP.
I can think of a million things that you — with your resources and abilities and so on — could have done other than running for president of the United States. And yet that’s the one you’ve chosen. Why?
Imagine if you were the guy getting medals and awards for creating jobs around the country and realizing that the jobs are about to disappear in a historic way. And all of the solutions involve really a much more intelligent, activated government than you currently have. And I went around and talked to various people, asking, “Hey guys, anyone going to solve the biggest problem in the history of the world?” And I could not identify anyone who was going to run and take it on.
I’m a parent. I’ve got kids who are going to grow up in this country. And to me, just believing that we’re going to leave them this shitshow that I think is coming and not do something about it struck me as really pathetic.
What if you continue to surge, but you end up not getting on the Democratic ticket as either president or vice president? And that somehow Trump asks you to run with him as VP— what do you do? I’d laugh at him. I’d say thanks, but no thanks. And I get behind the Democrat to beat Donald Trump. Mission one is to get him out of office. I’m not going to do anything that increases the chances of him sticking around for another four years. Certainly not help him run. Tell you what, if I did become his VP, it would be like a WWE-style thing, where I’d hit him over the head with a steel chair, take off my shirt, and it turns out I’ve got a Democrat blue jersey on underneath that thing. That would be hysterical. He would bring me in, we’d have a ceremony. And then while he’s gloating to the press, I’m taking off whatever jacket I have on and then I pick up the steel chair.
Let’s have a prediction. November 3, 2020. Who really, truly, in your heart of hearts and in your mind, who’s running for president and vice president on the Democratic ticket, and who wins the election?
This is going to sound like a cop-out, but I think that we’re going to wind up with a very fragmented field that lasts all through the spring, and there are going to be a bunch of us sitting together in a conference room in Milwaukee trying to answer that very question. So it’s very tough for me to forecast how that particular conference-room conversation is going to go. But that gives you a sense of how I think that the campaign is going to go, where you have five or six candidates that each have a base of support. It’s going to be very, very hard for anyone to get the 51% of delegates that you need to be voted in as the nominee. And so then, how do you decide? That’s going to be one of the most fascinating, historic conversations in our country’s history. And I plan to be at that table.
This column was adapted from the Freakonomics Radio episode “Why Is This Man Running for President? (Update).” You can find the full episode at Freakonomics.com. You can also listen on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform.
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