michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt, and this is “The Argument.” This week, Ross sits down with Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

andrew yang

I think there’s a huge hunger in America for non-ideological solutions to the problems that people are experiencing every day.

david leonhardt

Then, Ross, Michelle, and I talk about why Yang’s candidacy matters.

michelle goldberg

He exemplifies this spiritual crisis of the meritocracy.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

It is one of the things that I recommend to people all the time in real life. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Andrew Yang has spent his career working in technology startups, not politics. But now he’s running for president, and he has attracted enough donors— more than 100,000 of them— to qualify for the first Democratic debate. Why do so many people like Yang? Largely because he has released such a detailed policy agenda. It includes a crackdown on big tech companies and a universal basic income — $1,000 a month guaranteed for all American adults. First, you’re going to hear Ross’s interview with Yang. And then Michelle and I will come back with Ross to talk about the broader issues that his candidacy is raising and why it matters to the race, even if he is not the nominee. Here are Ross and Andrew Yang.

ross douthat

So I thought that we would just start with a kind of getting to know you discussion. Can you just tell our audience a little bit about your background?

andrew yang

Sure. The son of immigrants — was born in Schenectady, New York. My father was a physicist for G.E. and I.B.M., who generated 69 U.S. patents over his career. I went to college at Brown University, studied economics and political science. Didn’t know what to do, so I went to law school. Became an unhappy corporate attorney for five months. Thought it was a crummy job, and so I left to start an ill fated dot-com in the first bubble.

ross douthat

Can I ask what the goal of that dot-com company was?

andrew yang

It was very wholesome. It was called StarGiving.com. It was a union between FreeRice.com and a celebrity-affiliated nonprofit. So you click on a button. You’re then shown a list of sponsors who donate, let’s say, to Magic Johnson’s charity. And then one of you meets Magic Johnson and plays one-on-one with him. So we got a bunch of celebrities to donate meet and greets with themselves. StarGiving.com — “changing philanthropy one click at a time.”

ross douthat

[LAUGHS] You’ve got the voice. It’s perfect. And it was caught up in the greater pets.com crash.

andrew yang

Yeah, my parents told their friends I was still a lawyer. [LAUGHS] But I’d been bitten by the bug. And so I worked at a series of other technology companies. Eventually, I became the C.E.O. of an education company, Manhattan Prep, and was acquired by a public company in 2009. And this was the throes of the financial crisis. And I had this sinking feeling that I kind of knew why the financial crisis had happened, which is that so many of the smart kids I went to Exeter and Brown with were whiz kids on Wall Street, or management consultants, or unhappy corporate lawyers, like I had been very briefly. And so I started an organization called Venture for America to help channel talented young people to help build businesses in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, New Orleans, Birmingham and cities like that. So I spent seven years doing that. And I was staggered by the disparities between regions, where if you fly between St. Louis and San Francisco or Michigan and Manhattan, you feel like you’re traversing decades, or dimensions, or ways of life, and not just a few time zones. But I was still stunned when Donald Trump became president in 2016. And I became certain that the driving force behind his victory was that we’d automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa— all the swing states he needed to win and did win. And now my friends in technology know we’re about to do the same thing to millions of retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck driving jobs, and on and on through the economy. We’re in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country. And we’re scapegoating immigrants for something immigrants have virtually nothing to do with, when it’s really technology that’s the driving force. So, when I realized that this is what was happening, and my country did not understand what it was going through, and that certainly our political figures seem to have no interest in having a real conversation about this transformation, I decided to run for president. And that’s why I’m here with you today.

ross douthat

And we’re glad to have you. I want to get into some of your proposed responses to this radical transformation that you see happening in a couple minutes. But first I want to throw a kind of framework for your candidacy at you and see what you think of it. Because we had Pete Buttigieg on the show recently. And I think one of the interesting things that you partially have in common with him is that you are both sort of figures out of a very stereotypical vision of the meritocracy and how it works, right? You are elite college graduates who went into elite careers. For him, it was McKinsey. For you, it was briefly corporate law and then sort of dot-com world. And then you’re both figures who have become kind of rebels against what meritocracy is doing to America. And so in Buttigieg’s case, he literally moved back to his hometown, and ran for mayor, and tried to become a sort of local politician in a part of the country that’s been left behind by this kind of clustering of talent on the coasts. In your case, you sort of made a big career pivot from working in basically the testing industry, right? Like, literally the belly of the meritocratic beast to doing sort of venture capital for the heartland. Do you think that’s a fair way of seeing what you’re doing? Are you a traitor to your class, in a good way?

andrew yang

Well, certainly, I wrote two books about this topic, that I don’t think it’s the purpose of the meritocracy to train smart kids to do one of six things in six places— financial services, management consulting, technology, law, medicine or academia in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, D.C., or L.A. And those are the paths for 80 percent of elite college graduates. And those things are not going to be generative for most of America. And if you were a smart kid who grows up in Ohio, and you go to Penn or Duke, the odds of you going back to Ohio are vanishingly low. By the numbers the odds of you being on Wall Street trying to manage your various transactions are very high. And so if you rinse and repeat and do that for long enough, then you are heading towards a very, very dark stratified economy and society. And so I thought, well, the reason why all these smart kids are doing this is because that’s what they’re being presented with. That’s what they’re recruited to do. That’s where all the money is. But I have a feeling that they would rather build businesses in Detroit, or Birmingham or New Orleans. So let’s try and make that a legitimate path for them. Is that rebellion against the meritocracy? I mean, to me, it’s trying to redefine the meritocracy to be more generative and value creating.

ross douthat

Yeah, it’s interesting. Can you talk a little bit about sort of your experience going out into declining middle America to invest and what you saw there?

andrew yang

If there is one takeaway that I got from my time that I want people to understand, it’s that the functioning of the market and the meritocracy will not save us in this instance. Because I worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs throughout the Midwest and the South. And even if you project that all of their companies succeeded, they would not create enough opportunities for enough people to balance the industries that are shredding jobs and are losing vitality. I mean, I was struck when I was at Venture for America. There was 100 person startup in Providence, Rhode Island. And then a venture capitalist in San Francisco offered them tens of millions of dollars with the partial condition that they moved to San Francisco. So what did they do? They moved to San Francisco. And that company went from 100 employees in Providence to zero. And then the mayor of Providence was literally showing up at their office, being like, please don’t go. Please don’t go. But if you’re that business, what are you going to do? So if you go in and say, hey, I’m going to balance this out. Like, you’re fighting a fight against the combined firepower of all of our financial capital and the incentives of all the investors.

ross douthat

This takes us to the role of public policy. As you say, you’ve decided to run for president, in part because you think there are public policy responses to this stuff that aren’t on the table. We’ve also had Elizabeth Warren on the podcast. And she gets a lot of, I think, reasonable coverage for having put out some of the most detailed policy proposals of any Democratic contender. But most of her policy proposals are in sort of the lanes that you would expect from a potential Democratic nominee. And what’s interesting to me about your platform is that it has some of that stuff. And then it has—

andrew yang

Some other stuff.

ross douthat

It has some other stuff, right? It has literally dozens and dozens of ideas, concepts, proposals. And we can talk about some of the possibly stranger ones in a minute. But let’s talk about some of the ideas that I think fit into this notion of changing the way the meritocracy works and so on. Like, you have a proposal to help try and end bidding wars between states and cities for companies, like the kind that we just saw happen —

andrew yang

With Amazon.

ross douthat

With Amazon, right.

andrew yang

Which we should see as a national disgrace. We should make it so that if a city or locality, instead of bending over backwards and having this race to the bottom as to who can prostrate yourself the most for some company— for uncertain benefits because a lot of the benefits don’t even materialize — we should make all those local benefits 100 percent taxable at the federal level. So that companies can just make objective decisions on where they should move and not have communities bidding against each other.

ross douthat

Right, and this is where I think you are proposing ideas that a lot of people in both parties, but maybe especially on the right, would say, well, these are laudable goals, but they’re not a place where the federal government has a lever that it can pull. I mean, another example would be, you think there’s a lot more that could be done to control the cost of higher education, including reducing administrative bloat and expanding the number of kids who selective schools take. So talk a little bit about how that would work.

andrew yang

So if you look up and you say, why has college gotten two and a half times more expensive since you and I went to college, Ross, it has not gotten two and a half times better.

ross douthat

That was like 100 years ago, so.

andrew yang

Speak for yourself. So, why has it gotten two and a half times more expensive? And the sticker shock is blowing away families around the country, being like, what’s going on? Like, I’m going to have to pay $50,000 a year for my kid to go to college? And why? Why has college gotten so expensive? It’s not faculty. It’s not even facilities. It’s administrators. The administrator to student ratio has gone up 150 percent plus in the same time frame. And so you have to ask yourself, like, is the purpose of public education to hire an army of non-faculty administrators? And is that good for the American people? Is that good for the parent who’s trying to figure out how they’re going to send their kid to college? And so if these institutions don’t have the wherewithal to rein themselves in, which very few organizations would, then it’s up to the government to say, look, you can do whatever you want. But if you’re going to benefit from hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants and funding and billions of dollars in tax exemptions, then you might want to try and keep your costs down. And one way will help you keep your costs down is by providing guidelines around the appropriate administrator non-faculty to student ratio. And guess what? It will be in line with the way you were not that long ago, 20 years ago. And so the colleges, of course, will scream bloody murder. They’ll say it would be impossible for us to do our job with fewer administrators. And then you get to say, look, well, it’s up to you. I have a feeling you’ll figure it out. And if they went that direction, you would see that it has virtually no impact on the student experience.

ross douthat

But what is the stick there, right? So it’s not just guidelines, right? It’s, are you tying federal funding?

andrew yang

No, you could have a schedule. You could say, look, here’s what we think is an appropriate faculty to student ratio based on historical norms. You have five years to get there. And then the colleges will end up making necessary adjustments. But there’s no way for these colleges to take these adjustments on themselves. Because what are their incentives? They can just keep gouging families. The families just borrow more money. And loans are subsidized by the government. So if you’re the school, you look around and say, “Hey, if I do nothing, I can just keep on ratcheting up tuition every year.”

ross douthat

Now, and talk about the issue of expanding the number of kids who go to selective schools. Because I mean, one of the fascinating things, right, is that the U.S. News and World Report rankings, the top 10 or 20 schools, with a few exceptions, have basically been the same for a long time.

andrew yang

Forever.

ross douthat

Forever.

andrew yang

Yeah.

ross douthat

And none of these schools have grown, even as the U.S. population has grown. And they take in more international students, so—

andrew yang

And their acceptance rates have plummeted.

ross douthat

Right.

andrew yang

And so I think the acceptance rate to Brown University when I got in was something— it was selective, but it wasn’t like crazy. It might have been like 18 percent, 17 percent. It might be half that today. Again, you have to look at the incentives. So first, the fact that we have administrators gearing themselves towards U.S. News and World Report rankings is obscene, if you think about it. We’re talking about the rankings of a now quasi-defunct publication guiding the policies of billion dollar institutions to the public detriment. Why? It’s crazy. If you reflect on that for a moment, it makes zero sense. So the first thing you do is you say, look, we highly recommend that you tie zero comp to this archaic set of rankings.

ross douthat

But this is a case— and I think this is true of a lot of your ideas— where you are talking about figuring out ways to do state interventions in what are seen right now as either state and local issues, in the case of something like bidding wars, over companies, or essentially, private entities in the case of universities. And you’re pushing against both what I think is sort of the standard conservative objection that this isn’t the federal government’s role at all, and also, I think a pretty strong liberal sense that you don’t want the federal government telling universities what to do. What’s your response to those kind of objections that you’re basically engaged in sort of radical federal micromanaging?

andrew yang

We have to wake up to what’s going on around us, where the marketplace has run amok and has overrun most aspects of American life, including our government, including our educational institutions, and certainly including where companies are heading. And so, we have to ask very difficult questions, whether we think that’s the right way to go. I have a feeling most people listening to this think that the market needs some kind of counterweight. And so where does that counterweight come from? It has to be the government. There’s no other counterweight available to us. It’s why I’m passionate about my current run. Because people look up and say, well, the market will somehow figure out what to do with three and a half million truck drivers who are going to have their jobs automated away, or two and a half million call center workers, or 30 percent of retail workers. It’s like the market does not care about what happens to any of those people. The market’s just trying to get work done as efficiently as possible. The market doesn’t care what the cost of college is and if you’re going to subsidize it, like to the moon. The government is the only recourse. And most Americans have the same sense I do, which is that the market has run amok for far too long. And so if you believe that, then you have to look to government as a source of solutions.

ross douthat

And this extends to, I think, an issue that we’ve certainly talked about on the show that’s very much in the news in terms of having a kind of interesting right-left overlap, right? Which is the question of what, in effect, information technology is doing to people’s brains, what social media is doing to kids, and so on. And you have a couple of ideas at the very least in your epic, endless platform. One, you want the federal government to sort of look into serious ways to potentially regulate A.I., artificial intelligence. And you also want to study the anti-social impact of social media and technology on kids with sort of an openness to age limits on smartphones and things like that.

andrew yang

Yeah, and those are both things I do believe very strongly as a parent myself, where the data clearly shows a surge in anxiety, and depression, and mental health issues among teenage girls in particular, and that age is precisely synchronous with the advent of smartphones and social media apps. And my friend Tristan Harris in Silicon Valley says it very bluntly. He says, we have some of the smartest engineers in the country, getting paid millions of dollars to turn supercomputers into slot machines and dopamine delivery systems for teenage girls. Now that is their financial incentives. That’s the market at work. If they can make it more addictive, then the stock of these companies goes up. And they get millions of dollars. What is the counterweight for a parent who’s trying to protect their kids and have them not be depressed? And as a parent myself, you say, oh, it’s just in the parents’ hands. As a parent, you’re outgunned. And the folks in Silicon Valley know this so well, that they are among the biggest advocates of no screen time for their own kids. Now if you are an intelligent government, you look at this data. And you say, hey, we should probably get down to the nitty gritty — the guts of these apps — and the way these interfaces are designed, and the way they’re programmed. And that’s what my Department of the Attention Economy will do. I will put Tristan, who is a design ethicist, in charge of it. And these tech companies are literally, at this point, almost crying out for regulation. [LAUGHS] Because they’re—

ross douthat

Of a certain kind.

andrew yang

Of a certain kind. But—

ross douthat

Maybe not — I’m not sure they’re crying out for that kind of regulation.

andrew yang

They’re not crying out for this kind of regulation.

ross douthat

Not the dopamine hit regulation.

andrew yang

But the American people are crying out for the dopamine hit regulation. And so if you were a social media company, your financial incentives are tied every quarter to user engagement numbers and time spent on the app. And so you cannot do anything that’s going to bring those measurements down. And so we have to help them do it for the sake of our children.

ross douthat

I mean, what I think is interesting, right, is politically, in terms of sort of partisan coalitions, is that the stuff you’re saying there about Silicon Valley and some of the other stuff that you’re talking about puts you in obvious tension with a lot of traditionally libertarian Republican positions. But it overlaps completely with a bunch of Tucker Carlson monologues, right? He’s gone on rants about the iPhone and how impossible it is. And figures like Josh Hawley, the new Republican senator from Missouri, who’s doing a lot of stuff both on antitrust stuff generally with Silicon Valley and also these specific questions of the kind of slot machine effect of digital technology. Does it suggest to you a somewhat different political alignment than the alignment that we have right now?

andrew yang

Well, I consider myself a problem solver. And I think we need to have 21st century solutions to 21st century problems, instead of always looking back to what has been done in the past. And I think there is a huge hunger in America for non-ideological solutions to the problems that people are experiencing every day.

ross douthat

So then, let’s talk about your biggest idea here, right? Because I’ve been listing ideas that I tend to have a certain sympathy with. And I have a little more skepticism about the big Andrew Yang answer to this transformation that we’re living through, which is the Freedom Dividend. So why don’t you tell us what is the Freedom Dividend?

andrew yang

The Freedom Dividend is my rebrand of universal basic income. It’s a policy that would give every American adult $1,000 a month starting at age 18. It does not depend upon your work status, your income level.

ross douthat

So talk about how you think that’s responsive to the crisis of automation and everything else.

andrew yang

Well, it would create two million plus new jobs in our communities immediately, just because people would have this money. And it would end up going right back into Main Street businesses, into tutoring services, and car repairs, and hardware stores, and the occasional night out in main streets around the country. It would help recognize the kind of work that my wife does every day. My wife’s at home with our two children, one of whom is autistic. And right now, the market values her work at zero. G.D.P. values her work at zero. And we know that’s the opposite of the truth. We know that her work is among the most important and challenging work that anyone’s doing. It would help marginalized groups in particular. For example, a gay friend of mine said that gay teens are much more likely to get kicked out of the house and fired from jobs. And having $1,000 a month would help make them and their communities more resilient. So it helps on many, many dimensions. And it’s one of the only logical responses to the fact that we are now eliminating millions of the most common jobs in our society as we speak.

ross douthat

So that’s my first pushback question. Are we actually eliminating those jobs? Because it seems to me that if you look at trends in the American economy over the last seven years, we’ve had a very slow and gradual, but real return towards pre-Great Recession unemployment levels. We’re now down to 3.7 percent unemployment. Now there’s still a large percentage of people who are out of the job market, but the evidence of the last few years is that a hot economy can pull at least some of them back in. And over the same period, we haven’t really seen a lot of productivity growth in the U.S. and especially in Western Europe, which is what you would expect to see if we were in the midst of an automation revolution. So as I read your proposal, I sometimes wonder if it’s a response to something that is being theorized— that seems plausible, but that at the moment isn’t actually happening, right?

andrew yang

The manufacturing workforce went from 17 million to 12 million between 2000 and 2015. And 80 percent of those five million lost jobs were due to automation and technology. Now I studied economics. And economic theory would say of those four million manufacturing workers, they’d get retrained, reskilled, find new jobs. The economy would grow, and all would be well. So what actually happened to the manufacturing workers in the Midwest and the South? It turns out that almost half of them left the workforce and never worked again. And of that group, about half filed for disability. And then you saw a surge in suicides and drug overdoses in those communities, to a point where now American life expectancy has declined for the last three years. So this is real. It’s happening. And our measurements are pointing us towards this rosy colored future that most Americans are not experiencing. And if you look back on 2016, what was candidate Donald Trump saying about the headline unemployment rate? He was saying it was fake news. These numbers don’t actually match up with reality. Now that he’s president, of course, he’s ignored that. But it turns out he was right the first time, and he’s still right.

ross douthat

But he was talking about an economy with a higher unemployment rate and worse workforce participation rates. I mean, it is true that under Trump, things have gotten better. And I guess I’m just on this one specific point, I’m curious, why do you think if we’re in the throes of this revolution, we don’t see it showing up in the productivity statistics? Because normally, massive automation and technological change, you get a lot of people thrown out of work. But the people who are working should be more productive, right? And at the moment, we don’t have that in the statistics that I can see.

andrew yang

So there are a few reasons for this. Number one is that the productivity stats are all intrinsically backward-looking. So they’re going to show zero productivity increase for autonomous vehicles, until there are hundreds of thousands of autonomous cars and trucks on the road. Number two is that if you had an economy where people were forced to, let’s say, work for their survival, then you’d end up pushing a lot of people into kind of low productivity [LAUGHS] avenues because they have no choice. And you also have lower incentives for companies to automate away a lot of these jobs because people are willing to work for low wages. And it’s been one of the great economic mysteries, is like, why aren’t wages going up? It’s because people don’t have a choice. And companies are looking at it, being like, well, I guess I’ll just keep this person working for not much around. The economic record clearly shows that you only start jettisoning employees when there’s a downturn. And as a former C.E.O. myself, I’ll tell you that in a normal economic circumstance, you’re not firing people right and left. Because your general mandate is to try and grow, and grow efficiently. But then when the downturn happens, then if it’s not nailed down, you start to question it. And so we’re going to see the knives of automation come out during the next downturn in a huge way, which we’re already seeing in certain segments of the economy.

ross douthat

So, assuming that you’re right on that point then, let’s go to my second objection, which is also something that my colleague, David Leonhardt, wanted to raise with you, right? Which is that one of the big concerns about universal basic income proposals is that they might not lead to the kind of flowering of entrepreneurship and individual initiative that you’re talking about. And that they might instead end up effectively subsidizing social decay. That if you look at the depths of despair that you’re talking about— the rise of opioid abuse and so on — some of it is linked to the lack of structures of meaning in people’s lives, right? And an obvious structure of meaning — a source of dignity and purpose — historically has been work, and labor and having a job. And it seems like you can imagine a scenario where, essentially, the Freedom Dividend or U.B.I. is a kind of way for a country dominated by Silicon Valley to sort of stabilize things, making sure that the truck drivers don’t riot and the factory workers don’t revolt. Because they still have a check coming in. But it ends up just being a kind of subsidy for personal stagnation, which is another reason not to move to find a new job. It’s another reason to stay at home, spend the money on painkillers, to go deep into stereotyped— to play video games and look at pornography. So what do you say to that, that this is a kind of dystopian despairing vision?

andrew yang

So I could not agree more that people — human beings — need and benefit from structure, purpose, meaning, fulfillment. That was historically found in jobs, and civic organizations, and community. And that’s decaying around the country. So the big question in my mind is what are we going to do about it? And if you put $1,000 a month into Americans’ hands — let’s say you were a town of 10,000 people. And then that town all of a sudden has like another $10 million in spending power every month. How much of that money goes into local non-profits, and churches, and religious organizations, and volunteer organizations and arts organizations? A significant amount of it. And that’s one of the things that people are missing about this Freedom Dividend, is that the money ends up expressing the values of the people in those communities and creating work. And so if someone — sure, at least a couple of people in that town might become artists. And right now, there is no feasible way for them to become artists. But then others of them will end up working at their schools and churches and create some of the pathways to structure a purpose, fulfillment, and meaning that are already slipping away. This is, to me, one of the most powerful things we could do to actually give folks a path forward. Right now, we’re facing down, unfortunately, the dystopia as we speak.

ross douthat

So my other colleague on this show, Michelle Goldberg, had a somewhat different question. But I think it’s connected to that issue of dystopia. Your campaign — it’s been big on the internet. There’s been a lot of facets of your internet success. But one of those facets that has been sort of an issue for you as a candidate for the Democratic nomination is that a piece of some of the meme-making, alt-right, edgelord internet types who really like Donald Trump have, at times, glommed onto your campaign and become Join the Yang Gang in their own specific ways. So could you briefly talk a little bit about why do you think some piece of the alt-right likes what you’re saying?

andrew yang

First, as you know, I’ve repeatedly disavowed any such support. And I’m the son of immigrants myself. I don’t want support from people who have any kind of hateful ideology that they’re promoting. In terms of why they’re supporting me, I mean, I would suggest that there are many Americans who are looking up, who voted for Donald Trump. And I meet them when I’m campaigning around the country— who just felt like our government had become unresponsive. And Donald Trump is our president today in large part because he got some of the problems correct when he started saying— it’s like, hey, things are bad for a lot of Americans. The Democratic response in 2016 was, things are already great. And then the Democrats lost. And so if I’m coming along as a Democratic candidate saying the problems are real, that’s going to end up being something that Americans who are struggling are very sympathetic to.

ross douthat

Let me then take that answer and go sort of up a level of abstraction. Because that’s always a good way to end an interview at a highly abstract level. I don’t know if you read a piece by Jacob Siegel in Tablet Magazine about your candidacy. But I thought it was a very interesting take on what you’re doing. And he called you the first post-liberal politician, with the subhead being, Andrew Yang represents something new and exciting in American politics.

andrew yang

Oh, I’m new and exciting. I like it.

ross douthat

But we may not like where it leads.

andrew yang

No. I like the first half of that.

ross douthat

As journalists, we always play that game with you. It’s like, oh yeah, oh no.

andrew yang

I’ll stick with new and exciting.

ross douthat

But so what Siegel is saying, I think, is connected to what at least a piece of those sort of alt-righters see in you, which is that you’re talking about a much more different approach to federal level politics and policymaking than any other Democrat or than any Republican. And without explicitly saying it, you’re calling for a kind of regime change, which is different from the regime change that Donald Trump called for, but has some overlap in the sense that it is a sort of attempt at a radical reconception of the relationship between government, business, and the individual. What do you think of that high-flown view of your candidacy?

andrew yang

Well, the way I interpret that comment is very positive in the sense that we have these massive problems that we’ve inherited over the last number of years that our government has been unresponsive to. And so if you look up and say, O.K., it’s 2019. Soon it’ll be 2020. Donald Trump’s somehow our president. Tens of millions of our fellow Americans were desperate enough to elect a narcissist reality TV star. What are we going to do? What is the plan to help address these problems that have been festering for years? And who can help make those solutions a reality? And for better or for worse, you wind up with the federal government as the primary instrument of being able to solve these problems. And so if Americans see in me an overdue attempt to solve problems that have been with us for years, then that’s exactly what I believe this campaign is. And there are many folks who look around and say, hey, I wish it wasn’t the government. I wish it wasn’t the government, too. But if you look up and say we’re going through this economic transformation, what other realistic organization or entity could do something about it? There is no other entity but the federal government to help manage this transition. And that’s what it should be doing. We need to start having some faith in ourselves, in our people, and yes, our government, to try and solve these problems. Because we don’t have a choice. Like, if we just look up and say, hey, this will figure itself out, it’s just going to get darker and bleaker over time.

ross douthat

Right, and I guess to end with the same pivot as the subhead of that piece I just quoted, that’s the positive reading, right? But the negative, or at least, skeptical, reading is that you’re basically saying the combination of bad government policies and a sort of “move fast and break things” carelessness by Silicon Valley elites and economic elites generally has gotten us into this mess. And the answer is that we need a kind of benign alternative to that, where you have a really strong elite paternalism across a wide range of areas — economic, digital, technology, universities, all the stuff we’ve talked about. And I think it’s very easy to see someone sort of rebel against that and say, having watched our elite mess things up, you’re asking for a chance to have the elite fix it by giving them much more power over everyone’s lives than they have right now.

andrew yang

You know, I would certainly — because one of the reasons why I know that’s not the way my campaign’s being picked up is that I have a lot of libertarians who are supporting me. And instead of seeing this as some kind of paternalistic movement, it’s actually the opposite. It’s about individual empowerment and autonomy. And so right now, we have institutions that are crushing people and communities to dust. And we need to restore primacy to ourselves — the American people. And so this isn’t about the government making people’s decisions. It’s actually the opposite. It’s about empowering us to make our own decisions and to forge our own futures.

ross douthat

I guess I’m not going to talk you into acknowledging that you’re trying to build a horrifying dystopia. So —

andrew yang

Because I’m not.

ross douthat

[LAUGHS] I’ll leave off there and say Andrew Yang, you’re a fascinating candidate. And it’s been a great pleasure having you on “The Argument.” Thank you so much.

andrew yang

It’s been great being here with you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

O.K. Ross, Michelle and I are back together. And I want to start with universal basic income, which is sort of where you ended, Ross, with him. I think a lot of Yang’s diagnosis of what’s wrong with the breakdown in the American economy is spot on. But I don’t like his treatment. I’m just really uncomfortable with universal basic income. One, because I think there is dignity in work. And I think we should be finding ways to pay people for work, including at home work. And two, because if we really are going to give that many people that much money, it basically would probably require getting rid of a lot of existing government programs or really scaling them back, whether it’s Medicare or Social Security. So I’m not a big fan of U.B.I., but Michelle, I leave it to you to tell me if you think I’m being a neoliberal shill on this issue.

michelle goldberg

You know, it’s hard for me to say. I feel like I’m not totally sold on universal basic income one way or the other, in part because to me, it’s somewhat of an empirical question whether or not it works to transform people’s lives. And it seems as if the jury is still out, right? There’s been some pilot programs that have kind of discontinued. There’s an interesting pilot program in Stockton, California, where they’re giving people $500, instead of $1,000. And I’m interested to see what the empirical results are. It’s hard for me to think that giving anyone $1,000 a month is going to undermine the dignity of work. Because it’s still not really enough to live on for most people. And if anything, it seems like it would give people a little bit more security and flexibility to maybe do certain kinds of work that they would really want to do, or start a business or be more entrepreneurial. I think, like you, I think that Yang’s diagnoses are really, really interesting. And to me, his solutions range from maybe to sort of nutty. But I think one of the things that he’s right on about is this kind of stasis in the American economy, right? That people are stuck, they’re not moving across state lines, or they’re congregating in a few superstar cities, right? And I do tend to believe that a lot of the problems in American society are material, rather than cultural. I think giving people money is not a bad place to start.

david leonhardt

I mean, Ross, to state the obvious here, he is unlikely to be the Democratic nominee. I’d be interested after you sat down with him in what ways do you think he matters as a candidate? What are the ideas that he has that could actually catch on and outlast his candidacy if I’m right that he is unlikely to be the nominee?

ross douthat

I think he’s interesting along multiple dimensions. I think he’s interesting for some of the reasons I tried to get into as a kind of embodiment of this kind of technological technical elite, who thinks that the system that has benefited him isn’t working, which I think is a correct diagnosis and something that we should want to see more of from people who’ve gotten rich in that zone. I think he’s interesting because his ideas range beyond these sort of tranches that we’re used to from politicians of both parties, where you have your tax plan, and your health care plan, and your education plan. They get into much more interesting territory by virtue of their wild diversity. He’s interesting as an Asian-American candidate, right? He’s not the first Asian-American. Some people have erroneously said that. Bobby Jindal, as a south Asian-American, was a candidate for the Republicans last time. But there is this pretty interesting role that Asian-Americans play in these complex debates we’re having about race, and class, and identity, and everything else, where they don’t fit precisely into existing narratives about race and culture. And I don’t have sort of some big takeaway. But I think that alone makes him interesting as well.

michelle goldberg

To me, the thing that I find striking about him and that I have a sense is probably where some of his following is coming from, right, is that he exemplifies this spiritual crisis of the meritocracy. Some of his solutions that seemed to be more outlandish to me, like increasing the number of spots in highly selective schools, is the sort of thing that on the one hand, I’m all for, but on the other hand, speaks to the anxieties of a pretty small group of people. He’s kind of speaking to this sense that we have created these insane competitions for a few spots in these ultra-selective universities that then channel people into a handful of soul crushing jobs and that the whole cycle is divorced from any sort of broader meaning, or sense of community, or the common good. I mean, I think you see that sort of critique coming from a lot of different places. But he’s definitely the one who embodies it.

david leonhardt

And that reminds me, I wanted to make one little point. He talked about college costing $50,000 a year. College costs $50,000 a year only if you’re rich. Those schools that have that as the list price discount it really heavily for middle class people. And so you’ve got to be making well, well into six figures to be paying $50,000 a year, which goes to your point, Michelle, about some of these things applying to small numbers of people. But his overall agenda I do think speaks to a larger anxiety that’s out there. And as I was listening to it, Ross, I actually had one question I wanted to ask you. One of your kind of bits of skepticism for him was, well, these sound like good ideas. But can we really have the federal government doing them? And that’s something you hear from conservatives a lot. Our colleague, David Brooks, makes a version of that argument. And I guess, I always want to ask conservatives. But if you don’t have the federal government doing it, who’s going to do it? I agree with Andrew Yang that a lot of these problems, either the federal government’s going to do it, or we aren’t going to solve them. And you seem to be suggesting a kind of third option.

ross douthat

Well, I mean, I think traditionally, the conservative argument is that reforms can happen, and changes can happen in American society effectively from the bottom up. And that if you have a problem in higher education, you should be able to have a scenario where new competitors enter the marketplace, which is something that, for instance, a lot of libertarians have hoped would happen with online education. And they come in, and they disrupt an ossified status quo. And things improve, and prices go down. Or in social life, that you get some kind of civic and religious revival in these kind of stagnant heartland areas that starts in local communities and has spillover effects and so on. And so there is a conservative skepticism about the wisdom of having the federal government do things like this and just its capacity to do them effectively, which, although I’m more comfortable than many conservatives with the idea of federal activism, you also do have to recognize that federal programs that are supposed to sort of re-knit communities or rebuild higher education in some particular way have a pretty mixed record overall. That it’s actually these are hard problems in ways that make it hard for government programs to deal with them effectively. But then and then there’s also the fact that we live in a polarized and politically toxic environment, right? Where saying that, well, what we really need is for the federal government to redesign higher education — suppose it was a Republican president promising to do that. How would people in higher education react to that? How did people in higher education react to the Trump administration’s forays into taxing endowments? Not positively, right? So there’s that problem as well, that polarization makes it hard for the parts of elite liberalism that Yang is imagining shaking up — Silicon Valley and so on. It’s hard to imagine them being remotely happy with the idea that a Republican president could use his or her powers to shake up Silicon Valley or shake up higher ed.

michelle goldberg

I actually would be super uncomfortable with his plan to have kind of the federal government dictate the appropriate administrator to student ratio for exactly the reasons that you just said, right? Because I don’t trust the federal government, particularly when it’s under Republican control. But there’s an interesting tension, I think, in what he’s proposing. Because on the one hand, he’s proposing all of these very specific kind of micromanaging interventions into things like higher education. Whereas the beauty of U.B.I., of the universal basic income — and the reason that it has a lot more libertarian support than you might think — is that it actually kind of gets rid of government micromanaging, right? It gets rid of whole layers of bureaucracy deciding who’s entitled to what, and what sort of programs to fund, and how we should give people money in a way that might best lift them out of poverty, and just gives everyone the money. It’s interesting that he has this insight when it comes to his central social program, whereas giving states a lot more money for higher education would probably solve a lot of these problems without creating so many sites for mischief, and culture war, and the like.

ross douthat

Right. I mean, I think one of the classic sort of libertarian insights is that the one thing that the government is good at doing is writing checks, right? And this is why there’s always been this kind of libertarian support for U.B.I. as a substitute for social welfare programs, which I mean, Charles Murray famously — or maybe not famously — but did, in fact, write a book making a case for U.B.I. I think that my big doubts about it are similar to David’s, but they’re also just the ones I expressed in the conversation itself. I feel like there was this sort of vogue for U.B.I. arguments as we were coming out of the great recession. And it was part of this broader narrative that actually, the unemployment rate was going to be permanently elevated. And there were lots of marginal workers who just weren’t going to be employable in the new dispensation because technological change, and robots, and everything else. And that may ultimately be true. Yang may be right about where we will be in 20 or 25 years. But one of the lessons I’ve taken from the last few years of economic history is that it’s not true right now. Right now, you really can get the unemployment rate lower, right? And so in that environment, the potential social costs of U.B.I., of sort of incentivizing people not to get back in the workforce, do seem like a problem.

michelle goldberg

I don’t think it’s a fair assumption that giving somebody $1,000 a month will always be an incentive not to get back in the workforce, although it might require employers to do more to lure people back into the workforce, right? Because with the other lesson of the last couple of years is that you can get the unemployment rate down very, very low and still have a huge amount of poverty and insecurity among full time workers — still have this incredible precarity. And there’s a lot of this growth in employment is in these kind of very precarious gig economy jobs. And most projections that I’ve seen suggests that there’s going to be more and more of those kind of jobs going forward. And those kind of jobs do not lend themselves to stability. So it makes sense to build a floor under people.

david leonhardt

I mean, I see the argument for the floor. I guess part of my worry is that if you give every American $1,000 a month, you’re talking about a total expense of about $4 trillion a year. The total United States federal budget — military, Medicare, Social Security, education, transportation, you name it — is less than $5 trillion a year. And so universal basic income would need to replace enormous amounts of the federal government as we know it. And since I’m more positive than you are, Ross, about the federal government’s ability to spend money well, I just would be really worried about essentially replacing our federal government with checks. And I assume you would be too, Michelle, even if you’re more open to the idea than I am of giving people money.

michelle goldberg

I feel like you can sort of be a little bit more fanciful with these ideas because he’s not going to become president. If we think far down the road, because I think that all of us are in agreement that he has a lot of foresight maybe about what’s coming at us, right? So if you want to kind of think big picture about how you can create an economy that has some stability and dignity in the absence of strong, stable jobs, I think that’s kind of a license to consider big, impractical ideas and that things that are usable can come out of that exercise.

david leonhardt

Yep, I think that’s true. I mean, if you look at the list of policies on his website, it’s pretty amazing. Not only are there plans for climate change, and Medicare for All, and lowering the voting age to 16, but there are plans to reduce wildfires, and make marriage counseling free, and reduce packaging waste. There is even a plan to empower M.M.A. fighters. And I haven’t even scratched the surface here. There are dozens more on his website.

ross douthat

I will say that based on my sense of sort of the meme world that likes Andrew Yang, I think his explanation is broadly right. That there is a part of the people who are excited online by Trump, who are just sort of excited by weird possibilities in politics. And that’s mostly — not exclusively, but mostly — who Yang is bringing in. And he’s a candidate who’s implying that some kind of dramatic break is possible in Western politics in an era when I think political stagnation, and gridlock, and stalemate is a pretty important feature of our politics. And in that sense, I don’t think it’s surprising that there would be some overlap with some Trump curious, very online types.

david leonhardt

That seems right to me as well. I think there is also a message for the other candidates out there, which is there are a whole bunch of candidates with much more impressive political resumes than Andrew Yang who are struggling right now. Some of them haven’t qualified for the first debate the way he has. And I do think it’s possible to get some attention and to get some excitement from voters and individual donors by being substantive. And I’ve been a little bit disappointed that when you go to the websites of a lot of these other candidates, they’ve got very little on policy. I mean, even some of the serious candidates like Pete Buttigieg, who we’ve had on this podcast, he talks very substantively. But there’s not a lot that he’s actually put out in writing. And so, I guess I would urge other candidates to follow the lead of Andrew Yang on this.

michelle goldberg

Well, come on, follow the lead of Elizabeth Warren, right?

david leonhardt

Follow the lead of Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang. And hey, it’s what Barack Obama did 12 years ago.

michelle goldberg

Right, and the thing that’s been really encouraging to me is to see Elizabeth Warren — who, full disclosure, I’m in the tank for and my husband is consulting for — I was frustrated early on that she was seemed to be sort of being overlooked and getting very little traction. And that’s really changed in response to these very substantive policy ideas and that have given way to this broader “Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that” kind of meme, right? That her brand now is solutions.

david leonhardt

Yeah, Warren’s clearly having a good few weeks, which is another reminder that one of the ways to get attention in this crowded field is actually to be substantive. The way she clearly is and the way Yang is, there is room for many more candidates to be. So we will leave it there, and we will be right back with our weekly recommendation. [MUSIC PLAYING] O.K., now it’s time for our weekly recommendation, when we give you a suggestion of something to take your mind off of politics. Michelle, it’s your turn. What do you have for us?

michelle goldberg

O.K., so I’m going to recommend something that is super specific to New York City. It is one of the things that I recommend to people all the time in real life. And it’s called Fishion Herb Center. It is a shabby place in Chinatown, although the new place is less shabby than the old place. It’s a massage studio that is so good. I mean, I’m a connoisseur of massages. And I’ve been kind of a anxious person by nature. And that’s been ratcheted up tremendously in the last 2 and a half years. And I’ve had fancy massages. I’ve had a lot of mediocre massages. This place is $45 an hour. And it’s the best massage I think you can get in New York City. There’s no frills, no aroma therapy. But they’re just so good at what they do.

david leonhardt

I have to say there are a few things that I like as much as massages and yet, rarely do. So, I get fewer than one massage a year. And every time I get one, I think to myself, why aren’t I doing this a lot more often? So this is a recommendation that I definitely could use. Ross, are you a massage customer?

ross douthat

My views on massages are entangled with a much larger conversation about alternative medicine that we can have someday, but not today.

david leonhardt

Fair enough. OK, Michelle, what’s the recommendation again?

michelle goldberg

It’s Fishion— F-I-S-H-I-O-N— Fishion Herb Center.

david leonhardt