He is best known for championing Universal Basic Income, and loves to talk about AI and automation. This means that while he is a marginal candidate, he has the support of many transhumanists (even though he has not expressed any opinion on more radical transhumanist ideas such as radical life extension).
His policies seem to be basically technocratic/liberal.
From what I can see, he has very little on foreign policy. However, the part about retooling the military to more of a domestic focus suggests a less interventionist focus. This is backed up his Tweets, which are consistently anti-interventionist:
https://twitter.com/AndrewYangVFA/status/1091602277159354371
He is certainly a Sinophile. His platform contains numerous positive reference to Chinese policies, and of his thirteen Tweets [1, 2] about China, 5-6 are positive and the rest are neutral.
Of the two references to Russia/Putin, both are negative; it also gets a negative mention on the policy platform as a source of fake news.
While I suspect that some part of the discrepancy is explained by reasons of ethnic sympathy (Yang associates with Chinese-American societies), another part is that China has a much better reputation than Russia amongst technoprogressives (and not undeservedly so).
There is little to no SJWism. I found no mention of blacks on either Twitter or his website, with the exception of one page that actually focused on pay inequality between men and women.
He also campaigns on the opioid crisis and has hit it off with Tucker Carlson.
My own opinion is that as an obviously highly intelligent, non-neocon/neoliberal technocrat he would be a very good thing. His positions echo the concerns of Mid-West voters – deindustrialization, automation, the opioids crisis – so he’d be very well placed to trounce Trump in 2020.
His problem is that the Dems are now ideological zealots, so he has virtually zero chances of clinching the nomination.
He is nowhere near woke enough, or interventionist enough, or pro-“our greatest ally” enough (his website doesn’t even mention Israel). I would say he has even fewer chances than Tulsi Gabbard.
EDIT: Just noticed that Brandon Adamson, an HBD-realist transhumanist – the Alt Left on his website appeared is old, and meant to refer to the left wing of the Alt Right – has a much better and more comprehensive article on Yang.
Yang wisely has chosen to bypass the culture wars almost entirely and instead is focused on crafting complex solutions to actual problems. Rather than pandering to various “marginalized” identity groups, he looks at the bigger picture and remains committed to ideas which can improve the lives of everyone. The other candidates pay only superficial lip service to the issues we face, to the extent they have even thought about them at all. Yang has delved into the nitty-gritty of policy. I’m not even just talking about his “Universal Basic Income” proposal. Just take a gander at the treasure trove of policies presented on his website. This guy has thought of everything. He actually has a real plan. If even 1/3 of Yang’s ideas were implemented, the USA would be a vastly improved country. No other candidate has given any serious thought to the everyday issues that matter to Americans. Just the fact that Yang is promising to ban robocallswould be reason enough to vote for him. Yang’s American Mall Act would help to revitalize, repurpose and preserve many of these culturally important structures.
If you removed SJWs from Slate Star Codex commenters or Effective Altruism goons you’d probably get a similar program.
An intelligent, empathetic, and thoughtful…bugman.
TRUMP BETRAYED US. THERE IS ONLY ONE OPTION—BINDING SUPERSEDING NATIONAL REFERENDA.
Trump talked a lot about building a wall, but instead signed the finance bill granting amnesty and no wall, basically. He turned out to be a conman, or the Judaists blackmailed him too.
We can pass a national referendum banning immigration and mandating that all laws that affect the nation as a whole, such as raising taxes, large welfare programs, foreign aid, immigration, bailouts, and raising the debt ceilings, etc. can become law only if finally approved by the people. We will solve 90% of our problems this way.
For eg., see the website of the National Citizens Initiative for Democracy:
http://ncid.us
Everything I know about Yang is in AK’s piece above.
Anyone who wants to experiment with UBI has my vote. It removes welfare empires. It places the focus on the individual with a problem: drink, drugs, violence, self organization., whatever. We might solve more problems that way.
As Brexit has shown, referendums imposed on top of a First Pass the Post system don’t work well. They are a tool to create decisiveness in proportional representation system where there is a constitutionally weak executive.
You probably believe in a government of laws not men.
Read Moldbug. The sovereign decides the exception, and ‘the people’ have never been and will never be sovereign.
See what the establishment, the actual ruling institutions, of the UK did to the binding Brexit referendum.
Anyway, why would those in power ever give an inch to the likes of you?
The right-wing solution set to ‘social work’ is as follows: orphanage/adoption, the workhouse, the nuthouse, the pillory, the gallows, ‘transportation’ (Australia), the nunnery and the monastery.
UBI is essentially a libertarian proposal: If you get UBI and are able-bodied, we wash our hands of your problems. This is Manchester liberalism – at founding it was far left wing, now considered far right wing. (h/t Moldbug)
Under progressive rule (our deep state), there is no possibility of the second part “we wash our hands of you.” There is no left-wing solution to the falling-down drunk or heroin addict; thus they litter our streets. UBI is snake oil to tempt the right, for this reason. It can never replace welfare entitlements. You are unfortunately a sucker to support it.
Here we go, Russians already meddling in our 2020 election!
Don’t know if he’s tweeted his thoughts on immigration before. But from the Q&A of this talk he gave, the guy is pro-immigration from south of the border: https://youtu.be/MXiXhxPDnl8?t=1752
That’s the only flaw I’ve noticed so far from him, but it’s a glaring one.
Universal income?…I would expect universal conscription. If you can’t make 12,000 dollars a year? Maybe you get put under the UCMJ and get a job at 90-percent of the minimum wage…get health care through the military health system.
Universal health care? How do you run this non-profit?…tied to universal car insurance? Tax birth certificates? Federal sales tax to replace income tax?
Comprehensive defense/military reform? Close down bases and focus on defense and deterence? Probably won’t happen as long as the US and EU remain paranoid about energy supply.
Fix the roads in Michigan?…Probably won’t happen.
This guy probably winds up as little more than a trial balloon floater.
what is there to think about? just another democrat. a vibrant democrat at that.
a few people on the right are starting to develop a bad habit. some leftist says the sky is blue, so a couple rightists start paying attention. hey! that guy said the sky is blue too! he’s telling the truth about one particular thing that’s extremely obvious to everybody. maybe we should pay attention to this guy. maybe there ARE alternatives to republicans.
that’s patent nonsense, and experience should tell rightists so. all any democrat wants is to wipe us out, and when they get into office, that’s the only thing they do. everything else goes out the window. even if they are correct on one single issue, that gets changed once they are in office, so they don’t deliver, even on that.
republicans often don’t do what they say they’re going to do. so why ON EARTH would ANY rightist over 30 years old expect than a single democrat would do A SINGLE helpful thing that they said they would do? the idea that ANY democrat EVER, from this point forward, would do a SINGLE helpful thing, just because they said the sky was blue a few times during campaign mode, is an unacceptable error for older rightists like ramzpaul and company. they are being total idiots if they think any other way.
i know it sucks when you don’t get everything you want out of a republican, but they’re the only game in town. they actually deliver once in a while on an issue or two. democrats immediately go into eliminate europeans mode, on day 1. everything else gets tossed. how can people not see this after decades and decades of observing politics. desperation from the older guys who should know better, i suppose. desperate for somebody, anybody, anywhere, to do something helpful for america.
*Schmitt
just in time,
Whites have discovered
a Great Yellow Hope
(following closely on the heels of the Great Orange Hope)
Bad news for Russia if the US backs away from confronting China, and keeps unemployed US workers happy as they are made redundant by AI. The Chinese will not need to buy and reverse engineer the most advanced Russia. weapons forever. China is a vampire mercilessly draining productive capacity from the West, and suctioning energy and defence technology from Russia, which is counting on America to keep it relevant.
Everything?
Immigration->displacement? Where ?
Be that as it may, still a minor issue:
He is a Democrat, so, can he be trusted?
Bottom line, he isn’t important, as a candidate.
He is important in showing how all the rest actually don’t much care about an average American.
So….perhaps:
A (White) American candidate, clear about his intention to address the immigration/displacement problem, takes Mr. Yang economic ideas. Jobs, for example.
So, as we’ve already seen with the current fellow in White House, just two….two simple things:
Jobs and immigration.
Doesn’t sound complicated.
And, it’s not that hard to imagine that, say, “Righ”, or better, “Light” candidate wins the election. Could even happen. That appears to be the easy part, though.
Delivering the promises appears to be the hard one, looks like it, as we speak.
Ah, well, one thing at the time.
Time, a?. Demographics and such could prove tricky there, but let’s be nai..I mean, positive.
(Un)fortunately, either way one cuts it, some version of the Brave New World is the most realistic option.
Some other options do exist, but, a smart fellow wouldn’t plan for them.
Odd if true, given that his parents are both Taiwanese who arrived in the USA circa the early 1970s (Yang is b.1975 and a lifelong resident of the northeast, notably no ties at all to Asian-heavy California).
A lot of Chinese-American societies still today are Taiwan-oriented and anti-PRC. Taiwanese are well organized and have lots of friends in the USA.
From Yang’s Sept. 2018 tweet:
Who funds UCA? Who has ‘editorial’ control of UCA? Their web presence seems deliberately fluffy and obfuscatory, which raises my suspicion. To say it directly: Is UCA an arm of the PRC’s attempt at building its soft power? That is, with fairly direct ties to the PRC? If so, Yang may have inadvertently walked into a trap.
It is a warning sign when a group that gets called things like “biggest group of [x],” and holds national conventions, has little or no real online presence (especially for groups founded in the digital era): UCA’s Twitter (active from May 2017) has 37 followers. Their Youtube, 126 subscribers. I also note that the word ‘Taiwan’ does not appear prominently on their website, their list of affiliates shows not one that is clearly Taiwanese. They use simplified characters (as the PRC does) and not traditional characters (as Taiwan and many diaspora Chinese would). All suggesting to me PRC public diplomacy.
Tentative conclusions: UCA is a top-down affair (if genuinely bottom-up, the Taiwanese and other anti-PRCers would get a big seat at the table), and is at least pro-PRC. What its ties exactly are to the PRC government is not clear.
(On second reading, Yang’s tweet-line, “the biggest group of Asian Americans,” may refer to Chinese as a group, not the UCA specifically; in a quick Tweet he had to abbreviate his thought. It ends up ambiguous and seems like he is endorsing UAC and calling it the biggest Asian civic group in the USA.)
He wants to make Puerto Rico state. Says we need to invest in it. That it would already be a state if its people looked like Swedes. That is an interesting viewpoint – perhaps we’ve been investing in Puerto Rico the wrong way – and should have spent those billions in a Swedification process.
Imagine what that would do for the tourism industry there!
“We are fucked because of automation” is an interesting departure from the usual and insipid ” I have a plan for more jobs. ”
He seems to be surprisingly ignorant about how most robocalls work – they spoof the number. So, what is needed is a technical solution – something built into the system. Not a text line to report robocalls. Plus, he should campaign to ban political robocalls, or he is a shill. BTW, Nomorobo blocks most but not all.
Last time I was at my local mall, I found the experience disturbing. There was hardly any white people, and I was oggled by a disgusting Latina whale. But a lot of the people were Muslims and blacks. It didn’t even look the stereotypical American black ghetto it looked like the ghetto in the 3rd world. Oh yeah, and one of those Mexican (in America) TV channels was doing something there. Lol. Funny contrast to one of my earliest memories of a mall, when there was a modeling show of local white teenage girls, and that was much closer to the city.
All in all, though there’s worse, I still hope our eventual Chinese overlords are more enlightened.
I can tell you what I think about Andrew Yang: who the f… is he?
From the Joe Rogan Interview, I believe he said he is pro enforcing our border so we don’t get a flood of illegals trying to exploit the UBI.
But he also said he wants to make citizens of those with college degrees. This is pro HBD but not quite what most of us want. Still better than Trump probably.
https://youtu.be/cTsEzmFamZ8
With UBI, it’s likely that we’ll get the worst of both worlds. UBI plus the continuation of current welfare schemes like TANF, SNAP, WIC, etc. This is exactly what has happened to the Earned Income Credit. As they say, a government program, once created, is just about impossible to kill.
Also, Yang said that a thousand a month would be sent to ALL adult citizens. Why on earth would we be sending a thousand dollars a month to billionaires?
How much of his future asia policy will be dictated by his campaign statements? Could just be a way of getting votes from sino-american communities.
Wrote a comment on Yang’s platform here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/auhe14/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_25/eho12hz/
UBI sounds like a way to benefit shiftless Blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants (who form the majority of the poor in this country) at the expense of productive Whites.
If one didn’t one would have to debate where to set the limit of personal wealth, a potentially fraught issue. By giving it to everyone this is avoided.
Hundreds of millions, ready and willing, await — notably in China.
Does it matter? AZNS are the next on the hatelist right after whites, he is never getting that nomination.
Considering that Carlson and Wang both stand out as open minded and contemplative amidst the partisan bent of their professions, the interview was disappointing. Innovation is disruptive in the short term, but the consumer savings from greater efficiency of production (the classic example is industrial farming) boosts demand for other things, leading to economic development in more discretionary areas (such as travel, entertainment and ever-more ostentatious markers of status). It seems to me that high technology does not bode to make obsolete much of the traditional working class; rather, the level of tech-utilizing efficiency that a society is capable of sustaining is bounded by the capability of the workforce.
Although he’s to my left, Yang is the type of fairly reasonable guy a lot of moderate to right-leaning white voters could live with…which means he doesn’t appeal to blacks or latinos at all and thus is totally dead in the water as a Democratic candidate.
The activist part of the Democratic party is now essentially an anti-white cult. If you don’t endlessly cite the basic tenets of faith in explaining everything (praise diversity, condemn white supremacy/racism, etc) you are a heretic and must be squashed.
But the consumer is not reaping the benefits of this innovation.
Are companies passing through the cost savings of innovation to the consumer by way of lower prices or are they keeping the benefit for themselves through higher stock prices?
UBI is a definitely a step forward.
Needless to say, any politician who:
is focused on crafting complex solutions to actual problems. Rather than pandering
is a cut above.
Companies are motivated to increase their margins by innovation, and are the first to benefit from improved efficiency, but in any competitive industry, according to theory and observation, the margin of profit tends to approximate “normal” profit, as when it is lower than “normal” competition drops out and when it is higher competition comes in.
You want to figure out how inflation works? Really? Like it’s some sort of secret and we need to experiment with dumping billions of units of free, unregulated money on the consumer market to know what the result would be? Really?
(Though maybe you’re in the booze and cigarette business and are already calculating the windfall profits, lol.)
As if Republicans want or do something else!
Probably no hope for him until the Democratic Party splits. Might take quite a while, if it happens at all. And it would probably be something with a strong signaling value like the Greens – not necessarily an improvement.
Yang may be hinting at what an Asian-led Democratic Party would look like, but Asians don’t seem to be as aggressive or take the same interest in politics, so as a prognosticator, it is mostly academic. Not that I’m impressed – I would hope for something better. Besides, Asian pols generally toe the antiwhite line completely.
I think eventually Democrats will have to drop their antiwhite rhetoric (though not their ideology) because it cannot work longterm as a governing strategy in a one party state that once primarily white. I think at some point, when there is no opposition, even the cucks will become irate.
I do think at Democratic Party crackup is likely in the next 10 years or so – party elites like Pelosi look at their diverse coalition as a means to power, but don’t really intend for them to rule. However, the new crop of progressive activists are not content to be GOTV, they want to be in charge and thanks to the SJW ideology that has taken hold they believe only they have the moral authority to lead.
Further, I think (and hope) that more people like AOC and Omar will be elected, because they will alienate an increasing share of the Dem donor base, and the steady erosion of white support for the party will accelerate. In the meantime, I fully expect the more mainstream Democratic candidates to say and do things that send a signal to the dwindling share of the white vote that to stay in the party is to accept that going forward they have to accept being the last group whose concerns will be attended to. There are ethno-masochists who are just fine with that, but more who will look for a 3rd party or reluctantly switch to the GOP.
Here’s hoping anyway – otherwise, I think things domestically will get very nasty.
Lots of SSC commenters are HBD-aware which is basically why TheMotte subreddit was created after Scott Alexander was bullied for hosting wrong think.
How do you think a program by Unz review commenters would look? My bet would be mouth-foaming idiocy. The alt right types are good at being contrarian, not on being constructive.
If you are talking about the US, and if you group together blacks and Hispanics, this is correct, and given differential fertility rates, this will become increasingly true. But currently, according to this website, white, black, and Hispanic children are poor in about equal numbers (though certainly not at equal rates):
http://www.nccp.org/media/releases/release_34.html
However, the proponents of UBI are expecting more and more people to become unemployed and unemployable. If this expectation is accurate, then since whites still make up the largest single ethnic group in the US, they still stand to benefit in a significant way.
If you really want to toe the HBD line, would that not mean marginalizing, or even genociding lower IQ groups, with the premise that high IQ gives certain groups the right to do what they want against lower IQ groups, with IQ being a proxy to superiority? Which means that Indian Brahmins and Jews are within their rights to genocide lower IQ groups?
To be frank, instead of noblese oblege, why wouldn’t hard core social Darwinism be more compatible with HBD instead, and even more logical? Like maybe those with an IQ below 85 should not be treated as human? Or social Darwinism and racial nepotism?
“Science” derives from the Latin word for Knowledge, while Philosophy originates from Greek “Love of Wisdom”.
Knowledge can help make a more informed decision, but it cannot determine the answer of how to act on its own.
This is part of the mistake that those who “f–king love science” commit.
I believe radical egalitarianism to be more purely dangerous. Its process of subjugation is not theoretical but already taking place. It is an international ideology, with no geographic limitations, unlike the idea of nationalism, which is self-limiting.
Honestly, I don’t fear Jews and Brahmins on the warpath, supposing they fanatically took up the idea of right of conquest. IMO, there aren’t enough of them. If the Han were somehow so possessed and got their TFR high, then it would be more rational to fear them. But, as I said, they’d need to be possessed. That’s not really their attitude.
Most nationalists love the idea of nations. Not just their own.
He’s smart and does his homework in thinking carefully about policy (two positive traits he shares with Putin). If he wins, it would mean that Americans have begun to value those two things in their political leaders, which would be a positive sign for their country.
However, even if he becomes president…
I don’t think that things can actually be meaningfully changed in the American system — it’s designed for paralysis. Just like with G.W. Bush, Obama and Trump, the Borg will assimilate him within about a year or so (maybe 1.5 years).
Certainly nothing will change in foreign policy — it hasn’t escaped my notice that the last 3 American presidents who won were the ones who promised a more humble foreign policy in their initial election campaigns. It’s a popular promise that wins votes, but either it is never made sincerely, or it’s not a realistic one to actually carry out.
This is something that Surkov did get right in his resent essay — the real power structure in the US is not in plain view. For example, the one in charge of foreign policy during the Obama era was mostly McCain or whoever he represented (CIA?), not Obama.
I agree. However, to Yang’s credit, he hinges UBI payments on the household’s renouncement of other programs. This could be achieved through software. For those who regret switching to UBI, they can switch back. The net result is regressive, which is a good thing.
If we take the UR as a whole, you’re correct. There are a lot of excessively antisemitic commenters (antisemitism is objectively correct, but not everything is down to the Jews) and the site also has a fair number of Old Left commenters.
The commenters on Karlin’s blog would come up with a good program however.
The problem with your scenario is that it would keep the huge welfare state intact if people could stay with it. Having worked in the welfare system for many years I can attest that, with all the different non-cash programs available, the income of families with children is far more than $1,000 a month. Their total income is well above minimum wage.
If we don’t give it to everyone, you can be sure that people who already are net federal income taxpayers will pay even more to cover the UBI and get nothing in return themselves.
That includes families like ours, working hard and raising multiple children on a household income that makes them far, far from wealthy (e.g. less than $250,000 per year in Los Angeles or New York City areas).
It might be a step forward, but only IF the welfare bureaucracy is eliminated at the same time. We will need that savings to pay for the UBI without raising income tax.
Give federal government “social workers” and WIC staffers and the like good advance notice, like at least two years, to make alternative plans (get additional training / education, move to a lower-cost area, move to a smaller or less costly house in the current area, take on a weekend or evening part-time job to boost savings before the bureaucrat job ends, have a spouse who is not working get a job, cut frivolous household expenses, etc.). You know, the stuff the rest of us do when our taxes go up or the gov / corporations screw us by outsourcing our jobs to a foreign country or importing foreigners to take our job more cheaply right here in the USA.
The fear is that we would get a national sales tax in addition to the federal income tax, to pay for the UBI. We’d probably never get rid of either tax then.
A national sales tax and wealth tax that replace the income tax, though, might be something to consider. The sales tax, broadly applied to both goods and services, would give us a much broader and somewhat more stable federal tax base than we have now. Unlike the income tax, such a sales tax would ensure that the tens of millions of people who currently get direct gov subsidies but don’t pay income tax, would at least contribute some meaningful share.
To ensure that the income tax doesn’t return on top of it all, we would have to repeal the amendment authorizing the fed income tax, and that seems extremely unlikely now or in the foreseeable near future. Sigh.
Fair point, but not for long.
Whites will soon be a minority nationally, as they already are in most of our most populous States: California, New York, New Jersey, soon to be followed by Texas, Florida, and Illinois. Also, in the short to medium run, there may still be a higher percentage of whites employed than the corresponding percentage of Africans, even if whites’ economic and social resources and prospects are declining steadily overall.
So a UBI in the USA would still disproportionately aid Africans and disproportionately harm whites.