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Comment by bt1a | Hacker News Reader

Trickle up, baby. Man I love Andrew Yang and what his mission is with Humanity Forward. Good move, Jack.

Same here but I really wish he wouldn't kowtow every time some wackjob group is screaming at him. He took a very moderate and reasonable stance on a lot of contentious topics during his campaign then rolled them back within a day of getting lit up by twitter trolls. I think he lost a large section of centrist voters by appearing spineless.

He took the best policies from the left and right, but also seemed obligated to tow party lines a lot of the time rather than offer up better alternatives. I wish he would have run third party, he could have taken a lot of moderate votes from President Trump. The democrats didn't stand a chance of winning this election, at the very least he would have sent a message to the next generation that there are other options.

Yang definitely waffled on MFA and appeared to not support it towards the end. That was something of him that I was disappointed - I couldn't understand why he didn't realize that MFA is the way to go. I do wonder if he waffled on it to retain support from people further to the right.

That said, I actually think Yang's ideas are going to reverberate throughout political discourse over the next decade. Similar to how Bernie pushed the base range of the Democratic party to the left, Yang shed light on some great issues that will plague us. For example, what are going to do about the massive loss of employment due to automation? Are we going to attempt to retrain these people? That's historically not been very successful.

What is MFA?

Medicare For All I'm assuming

Quarantine has accelerated forecasted job loss. Whether we return to baseline by next year, a lot of companies are going to take this opportunity to lean out without fear of backlash.

Retraining is not the answer (and I don't know what is). Many of the jobs killed by automation were things people could command a reasonably high salary to do, but did not need extensive training for (these are referred to as "good jobs"). Offering the same salary (or even more), but requiring multiple years of training, just isn't going to fly with these people.

Creating new jobs is the answer. The question is whether you think rich CEOs and capital owners or a wide, empowered middle class are the best to come up with those jobs.

Tech should know better. The best thing Apple et al. ever did for their platforms was to open them to the ingenuity of the masses, and keep the barriers to entry low enough that they didn't discourage new ideas from blossoming. The market economy isn't an end unto itself; it's a platform on which goods are developed and needs can be identified and met.

Retraining is part of the answer. For professional jobs (in the classic sense) continuous training is a core tenant of remaining current in the field and if applicable maintaining licensure. The faster technology moves, the more everyone should be thinking about how careers will be in a constant state a flux. Not just retraining from a factory job to some service job, but every few years basically having a role that has morphed into something new. We need institutions, practices, and norms that reflect the new normal of high-technical change.

Many historical blue-collar jobs that have been automated (or even things like farming before it) were much higher-skill than most people give credit for. It is just that the training and general knowledge available to perform well were more ambiently available. An example today is working with standard business software. You don't get trained in office and excel, you get trained on how they are used in the company's specific workflows. Companies also had more on the job training and apprenticeships.

So I also don't know what do with the wave of truckers that will be automated away with self-driving big-rigs (presuming that happens) but I think the future is one where we don't actually have as many folks dedicated to one line-of-work where such a jarring transition is necessary. Or perhaps the corollary, that we should aim for that more dynamic approach to prevent further disruption of big discontinuities

>I couldn't understand why he didn't realize that MFA is the way to go.

Maybe because that's not a fact. MFA might not be the way to go. This isn't a simple binary issue.

no, he waffled

in interviews he literally said, when challenged, that "mfa isnt actually a bill" and that "mfa to means xyz" when actually mfi is a bill and specifically defined as a policy not some ambigous goal of "getting everyone covered, lets discuss how to get there"

i was deeply dissapointed in him after that...

Mfa?

"every time some wackjob group is screaming at him"

"He took a very moderate and reasonable stance "

No, you don't get to label anyone who disagrees with a risky, existential upheaval as a 'whackjob'.

UBI is a fairly extreme ideology, partly because of the social welfare application, but mostly because of the cost - which its proponents tend to ignore.

We can argue a little bit over what 'free money' means for people, but the case falls flat when someone talks about a program that costs $350 Billion a month, or about 3 Trillion a year. FYI US economy is about 20 Trillion.

UBI is not a discussion about 'free money' or 'welfare' or 'means testing'.

UBI is a discussion about the existential level of wealth transfer or debt creation that comes from the most expensive program ever conceived by any government in the history of civilization.

The UBI discussion really needs to start with 'where do we get $350B a month'?

Because all the nice talking points are otherwise academic.

Yang reminds me a little bit of Marx - really amazing insight and thoughtful understanding of problems ... but solutions that miss the point entirely.

>about 3 Trillion a year. What a coincidence, that is approximately how much we've spent on corporate welfare since the Corona Virus crisis started.

Yes, and it's part and parcel of the worst economic crises since the great depression, and in some ways worse than the great depression, i.e. the worst numbers in the history of the entire US.

So yes, the scale and repercussions of UBI are issues that nobody seems to want to talk about.

"The UBI discussion really needs to start with 'where do we get $350B a month'?"

Congressional appropriations create money. That's how fiat currency works. We're not on the Gold Standard, we don't need to trace who holds how many Pretty Yellow Rocks.

The real question is "What is the inflationary impact of that spending?", and thus what level taxes have to be raised to destroy enough money to negate the inflation.

One interesting insight of MMT is that taxing $1,000 from the rich and giving $1,000 to the poor, is not actually necessarily "free", or net-non-inflationary. Because the poor on average spend more of the money that they have (on basic necessities like food and consumer goods), causing prices of those goods to rise which reflects in headline inflation. Whereas money in the hands of the rich tends to result in inflation of financial asset prices.

If a redistribution of this sort did cause a too-high level of consumer inflation, some additional counter-cyclical policy would be needed to counteract it. (The point I'm trying to make is that making sure that federal spending debits and credits cancel out to zero is neither necessary nor sufficient for good economic policy.)

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