Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-jobs-lost-automation/

According to a report from the Obama White House in 2016:

In addition to understanding the magnitude of the overall employment effects, it is also important to understand the distributional implications. CEA ranked occupations by wages and found that,according to the Frey and Osbourne analysis, 83 percent of jobs making less than $20 per hour would come under pressure from automation, as compared to 31 percent of jobs making between$20 and $40 per hour and 4 percent of jobs making above $40 per hour (Figure 3a). Furthermore, the OECD study estimates that less-educated workers are more likely to be replaced by automation than highly-educated ones (Figure 3b). Indeed, the OECD study’s authors estimate that 44 percent of American workers with less than a high school degree hold jobs made up of highly-automatable tasks while 1 percent of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher hold such a job. To the degree that education and wages are correlated with skills, this implies a large decline in demand for lower-skilled workers and little decline in demand for higher-skilled workers. These estimates suggest a continuation of skill-biased technical change in the near term.

The most common jobs in the country are at high risk of automation. In the graphic at the top of this article, a larger black bar indicates jobs more at risk of automation. The size of the overall bar indicates the number of people employed in that category.

The worst thing is that this isn’t something that’s going to happen all at once a decade from now. It’s already happening today.

x When I spoke to 70 major CEOs and asked how many were looking to replace backoffice workers with AI - 70 hands went up. ThereÃ¢ÂÂs a reason that technologists know this is real and about to accelerate. — Andrew YangÃ°ÂÂ§Â¢ (@AndrewYang) June 16, 2019

Two of the most common jobs in the United States are retail sales person and cashier.

If you add together the market value of Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, JCPenney, Sears, and Macy’s, and they amount to $297.8 billion. However, Amazon alone is worth $356 billion with less than a third of the number of employees of just Walmart.

For more than a decade Amazon has been sucking up billions of dollars in retail every year leading to the death of malls and main street stores.

It also recently entered the physical store market, creating a new wave of cashier-less stores. The stores are small compared to normal retail stores, and use camera technology to determine what you’re buying and charge you. Other retail companies have also started adopting this technology.

Those larger companies, such as Walmart and Target are also moving toward a future of fewer employees.

Online ordering, self checkouts, and kiosks are becoming more common. As are floor cleaning robots and shelf scanning robots. Walmart has been making use of all of this technology.

Like Amazon, Walmart has also started developing advanced AI stores. This image is the new store opened in Levittown, N.Y. The store contains more than 30,000 products and has a staff roughly half the size of traditional Walmart stores.

Unlike Amazon’s cashier-less stores, the idea for Walmart is that the AI will help the store associates know more precisely where and when to restock products.

As retail technology becomes more advanced, it places pressure on competition to do the same or go out of business. The cost reduction from technology allows companies that innovate to put downward pressure on prices in the market.

Secretaries and Administrative Assistants

After retail sales, another common job includes administrative assistants. This job often revolves around managing schedules and taking phone calls. Google recently announced a product called Duplex, a technology based on the Google Assistant. It is a completely automated system that places calls on your behalf with a human-sounding voice, not a robotic one. Listen to this example:

Truck Drivers

This image is a map of the most common jobs in each state from 2014. As you can see, truck drivers are the backbone of our economy. And tech companies are working to make this task more efficient with self driving technology.

There approximately 8.2 million trucking-related jobs in the United States, 3.5 million of which are the drivers themselves. In 2019, the trucking industry faced a major driver shortage. Hundreds of trucking companies declared bankruptcy, 640 failing in the first half of the year alone. This shortage is driving the push for self-driving technology.

Those 3.5 million drivers also regularly stop to eat, drink, rest, and sleep. That creates jobs for millions of others at motels, diners, truck stops, etc. If self-driving trucks become a wide spread feature of the industry, then millions of those other jobs will be at risk.

Debunking Common Arguments Against Automation

There are two common arguments against inflation. The first is that the fears of automation are as old as the first industrial revolution. So far there have been three industrial revolutions, and yet unemployment is still low. So clearly we’ve always been able to create new jobs right? Sort of.

When you look at the types of jobs that have been created in the last 100 years, the vast majority of them are types of jobs that already existed 100 years ago. We simply created more of them.

The second argument is that “we’ve had the internet for 15 years and productivity growth is slowing down, not speeding up.” According to Gerald Huff, a principal software engineer from Silicon Valley:

From 1997–2013 we added 10 billion hours of labor into the least productive sectors of the economy and shifted another 10 billion hours from the most productive sectors to the least productive sectors. Is any wonder productivity growth hasn’t looked so great? ... So the answer to the objection “where’s the productivity?” is this: it’s in the sectors where the technology of the last 15 years has been most easily and quickly deployed.

What Comes Next for Workers?

Source: 20 American Ghost Towns — Detroit

After the factories in Detroit, Michigan closed, much of the city became a ghost town. Even as recently as 2016, Detroit had more vacancies than any other U.S. city — more than double the next two ranked U.S. cities combined.

By 2014, the median Detroit home price fell by nearly half to just $45,100, compared to a national median value of $175,700.

A common response to this issue is that we should retrain workers who are displaced for the jobs of the future. However, if you told a 40-year-old truck driver to learn how to code, he would probably just laugh at you. After we automated away millions of manufacturing jobs (80% due to automation), we tried to retrain workers. The United States has had a very low success rate at retraining workers. Instead, most of them dropped out of the work force.

Here is a snippet from Andrew Yang’s The War on Normal People.

How do the 40% of displaced workers who don’t find new jobs survive? The short answer is that many became destitute and applied for disability benefits. Disability rolls shot up starting in 2000, rising by 3.5 million, with the numbers increasing dramatically in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other manufacturing-heavy states. In Michigan, about half of the 310,000 residents who left the workforce between 2003 and 2013 went on disability.

$15/hr Minimum Wage and FJG vs. Universal Basic Income

Andrew Yang is running for President in 2020 on with three major policies: the Freedom Dividend, Medicare for All, and Human-Centered Capitalism.

One common misconception that I always hear is that $30,000 > $12,000. This is referring to the fact that $15/hr at 40 hr/week is approximately $30,000 per year. However, that is assuming the person getting $12,000 per year UBI is not employed. If a person is not employed, it doesn’t matter what the minimum wage is. They would earn nothing. To compare similar scenarios it makes sense to compare both individuals working the same number of hours per week.

Source: #YangGang

Source: #YangGang

As you can see in the graphic above, in nearly every scenario a basic income of $1,000 per month results in a higher gross income than a $15/hr minimum wage. The minimum wage where a basic income surpasses it at 160 hrs/month is $8.75/hr. At 80 hrs/month (part-time), that value is $2.50/hr. If $15/hr minimum wage were passed, the maximum number of hours a person with a basic income would need to work to earn the same amount as somebody without a basic income is 93 hours and 20 minutes per month.

When you factor in income taxes, even $7.25/hr is only slightly better than the untaxed raise offered by a basic income.

The average state minimum wage is $8.78. So whether a $15/hr minimum wage is passed or not, workers will almost always be better off with a basic income than without — either by time saved or by total income earned. Plus, if all you do is raise the minimum wage to $15/hr, it doesn’t do anything to help people struggling on $15.25 per hour.

x My friend makes $15.25 p/hr at 36 hrs/wk. Or $2361 per month pre tax. - tax about $1950. Her rent is $1595- 2 BR apt in a shitty part of town. That leaves 355 the rest of the month for her & her son. But then pay for food/power/Ã°ÂÂÂ... Tell me how a $15 minimum wage will help her? — oMissxPrisso (@oMissxPrisso) September 16, 2019

Finally, raising the minimum wage to $15/hr nationwide would hurt small businesses in rural parts of the country. It makes more sense in local areas where the cost of living is higher, but not nationwide. A $15/hr minimum wage in much poorer states like Mississippi would decimate small businesses. Amazon supports a $15/hr minimum wage, because a) they can afford it, b) they hire much fewer employees thanks to automation, and c) they know it would accelerate the closing of malls and small stores that require human labor, thus reducing their competition. As you can see from the above chart, a basic income provides the same buying power to Americans, but doesn’t burden small businesses to make it possible.

x #Warren, #Ohio

Adult Pop 36,546

Median Income $29,241#Poverty 34.6%



By giving every adult in town $1000 @AndrewYang wants to invest over $36.5 Mil into it #EverySingleMonth



Once you do the #Math, you can see how transformative the #FreedomDividendÃ°ÂÂÂ½Ã°ÂÂÂ° really is#Yang2020 pic.twitter.com/ttWuKK3GlG — Ã°ÂÂÂ°Ã°ÂÂÂ½EverySingleMonthÃ°ÂÂÂ½Ã°ÂÂÂ° (@EverySinglMonth) October 15, 2019

x Pine Ridge Reservation, #SouthDakota

Adult Pop (over 20) 11,312

Median Income $26,721#Poverty >80%



Among the poorest places in America, @AndrewYang's #FreedomDividendÃ°ÂÂÂ½Ã°ÂÂÂ° would inject over $11 Mil into the reservation #EverySingleMonth



This #Math is beyond Transformative pic.twitter.com/WjkCc7lG8n — Ã°ÂÂÂ°Ã°ÂÂÂ½EverySingleMonthÃ°ÂÂÂ½Ã°ÂÂÂ° (@EverySinglMonth) October 15, 2019

Additional benefits of basic income is that it recognizes work that is not valued by the market. Andrew Yang has said “we need to change our definition of work”. Right now in order for the market to value the work, it has to be based on employment. If you’re not employed by an employer or self-employed, you earn nothing. There are many forms of “work” that we value as a society, such as parenting and care giving, that the market takes for granted.

There are some unanswered questions with a federal jobs guarantee:

What do you do when you guarantee a person a job, but they don’t like that job or their boss or don’t do a good job? Do you still guarantee them the job? Much better to guarantee the basic income and let them find the work OR employment that they believe is right for them.

What about parenting? Are we going to trust strangers with the guaranteed job of watching children, so that the parents can go to their guaranteed job? Much better to give parents a basic income (total $2,000/month per couple) to allow one of the parents to stay at home with their children. It’s proven that children do better when parents spend more time with them. Single parents, with an extra $1,000/month, can hire a babysitter they know and trust, rather than a stranger with a guaranteed job.



For the record, I am not against a federal jobs program. It’s the “guarantee” part that raises issues. Whether you believe in a federal jobs guarantee or program in order to get important projects such as infrastructure and clean energy done or not, we need to decouple the income needed to survive from employment.

Welfare vs. Universal Basic Income

The problem with our current safety net

is that, like a literal net, it’s full of holes. 1 in every 5 citizens who qualify receive any assistance at all. For those who do qualify, the amount of benefits they receive often leaves them well below the poverty level, especially in the poorer states.

Another major flaw is the management that comes along with it. Families receiving federal assistance have their incomes and assets monitored by case managers. Beneficiaries often have to worry about earning too much and ending up worse off.

Andrew Yang’s flagship proposal is Universal Basic Income, which he has rebranded the Freedom Dividend. This terminology makes a lot of sense. Alaska has had a variation on Universal Basic Income for decades enacted by a Republican governor. It is based on oil revenues in the state and is universal to every citizen of Alaska. The check is a dividend to the shareholders of Alaska… it’s citizens. And the only requirement is being a citizen, freeing them from having to worry about having their assets monitored by the government.

Andrew Yang’s says that the oil of the 21st century is technology. Given what we know from above and how valuable data is for technology companies, he’s right. Tech companies like Amazon and Google collect and profit from our data. With significant improvements to AI being developed, data is becoming more valuable than oil.

For this reason, Andrew Yang’s plan is to implement a VAT on non-staple, luxury goods and usage of data, such as robot truck miles, google searches, Facebook advertisements, etc. With this revenue, his proposal is to fund, what he calls a “tech check”.

The major difference between welfare and basic income is that welfare is much like a net trapping you in poverty rather than protecting you from falling. On the other hand, basic income is like a foundation that you can build upon. It stack with earned income, and in the Freedom Dividend’s case, with disability (VA and SSDI), retirement (401k and Social Security), and unemployment insurance and housing assistance.

x .@cenkuygur asked @AndrewYang what welfare programs he'd end or decrease funding in order to do #UBI



"I would not touch any of our existing programs. The freedom dividend is meant as a complement." #SteakFry #tytlive pic.twitter.com/wAW8TzHUzr — The Young Turks (@TheYoungTurks) September 22, 2019

When it comes to deciding whether to defend means tested programs or replace them, it’s best to listen to the people who have been involved in or affected by such programs. Here’s a few stories about the types of benefits that you would have to opt out of to receive a condition-less dividend:

x I worked as a consultant for the Department of Public Welfare for more than three years.



IÃ¢ÂÂve done the #MATH, and @andrewyangÃ¢ÂÂs #FreedomDividend is vastly superior to many public assistance benefits.



I explain in this thread.



cc @scottsantens, @Zach_Graumann — Zach Good (@NotToddZeile) November 8, 2019

x Okay you want to talk about a welfare safety net? LetÃ¢ÂÂs talk about a welfare safety net. A thread on welfare, from a kid who grew up on food stamps. /1 #yang #yanggang #yang2020 #andrewyang #HumanityFirst #yangbeatstrump #ubi #DemDebate — the real Cal Kestis (@klogsdon27) November 20, 2019

x HereÃ¢ÂÂs my take on Welfare vs UBI:



Thread.



As a kid, my family was on food stamps for 8 years. We kept getting benefits for as long as we stayed below earning $25,000/yr. If we passed that threshold by 1 penny, we would lose all benefits. — Jose Nieves Ã°ÂÂ§Â¢ (@those_rimshots) August 14, 2019

x My disabled Mom just told me that her #SSI got halved because she took a min. wage, part-time job. ThatÃ¢ÂÂs after her #SNAP benefits were already cut by the SSI. SNAP is gone now.



Oh, and despite being viz. impaired, she canÃ¢ÂÂt get SSDI. @AndrewYang, please win. #BasicIncomeNow — James Treakle Ã°ÂÂ§Â¢ (@JamesTreakle) October 11, 2019

x IÃ¢ÂÂm on food stamps & am disabled but like many others I cant qualify unless I pay for a lawyer which leaves me without an extra $500 in income vs the FD #UBI & accounting for the VAT I would net gain around $900 per month. #MMT #BernieSanders people defend Welfare. Why? #YangGang — rwsmthÃ°ÂÂÂÃ°ÂÂÂ¿Ã°ÂÂÂ®Ã°ÂÂ§Â¢Ã°ÂÂÂºÃ°ÂÂÂ²Ã°ÂÂ¤ÂÃ°ÂÂÂ¿ (@rwsmth) September 21, 2019

If you were to ask somebody receiving benefits whether they would prefer case managers and $400-800 in conditional benefits they have to spend on what the government tells them to or a basic income that they can do whatever they want with, I think 99% of them would forgo their benefits, even if they earned slightly more than $1k in the types of benefits they would have to give up.

We need to get out of this mindset of scarcity and transition to a mindset of abundance like these amazing people:

Anyways, thanks for reading! Have a great weekend! #HumanityFirst