Yang said that if you confront what is happening with our labor force, universal basic income is inevitable.

The upcoming U.S. midterm 2018 elections are just a few months away, but chatter is already starting about the 2020 election.  The potential field for Democratic presidential nominees is wide, including familiar faces like former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden along with newcomers like California Senator Kamala Harris. Even Oprah’s name has been dropped.  

Long-time entrepreneur Andrew Yang is committing early to his presidential bid with a message of “humanity first.”

“We are in the middle of the greatest technological, economic shift in human history,” said Andrew Yang, who recently spoke to a room full of millennials at the OnePiece co-working space located in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood.

The presidential hopeful championed his universal basic income plan (UBI) - the Freedom Dividend, which he claims is an old, deeply American idea and one that was mainstream political wisdom in the sixties and seventies. This UBI plan will give “every adult American adult between the ages of 18 and 64 will receive $1,000 per month - free and clear, no questions asked.” The plan has no work requirement. He anticipates that, “it’ll create 4.5 million new jobs and grow the economy by $2.5 trillion.”    

The first Chinese-American Democratic presidential candidate explained that he is running for president because it is the only option “that would give a moderately strong chance of making the big changes we need to make” over the next decade.

Yang, founder of Venture for America - a nonprofit that places recent grads who want to work at a startup in American cities, attributes the 2016 election outcome “to automat[ing] away 4 million jobs” in America’s Rust Belt. He added that Silicon Valley and the tech industry know that “we are about to do the same thing to workers in retail, truck driving, call centers, and on and on.”

He predicts that in the next five to ten years, artificial intelligence and automation will displace these job categories, which he says total about half of the American workforce.  Citing political leaders’ lack of acknowledgement of the problem and their focus on what he indicates are ineffective government retraining programs, Yang concluded that “our institutional leaders are just totally not up for this challenge - it is beyond them.”

Yang admits that beyond politics, there are challenges with the American public’s mindset on UBI. “For most people, they just don’t imagine it’s possible,” he said. “Where would the money come from? How can you get money for nothing? A lot of it really is about mindset.” He is calling on Silicon Valley to push Washington D.C. forward on UBI. “San Francisco is such a mindset of possibility and abundance … We need to show the rest of the country what is still possible.”  

Learn more about Yang’s platform.