Andrew Yang: We're undergoing the greatest economic transformation in our history

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/14/opinions/greatest-economic-transformation-andrew-yang/index.html

By Andrew Yang
Updated 8:12 PM ET, Sun April 14, 2019


(CNN) — I never thought I'd run for president. My parents were immigrants to this country -- and leader of the free world was not on the list of careers presented to me as a skinny Asian kid growing up in upstate New York.

Instead, I became a lawyer for five unhappy months and then an entrepreneur. In 2011, I started a nonprofit organization, Venture for America, to help bring talented young entrepreneurs to create thousands of jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, Baltimore and other cities around the country. I chose those cities because there I experienced the aftermath of automation and witnessed the devastating effect it had on people's lives.

And then Donald Trump became President.

For Americans who are still trying to figure out why Trump is President, the answer is simple -- we automated away millions of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, and Trump spoke directly to the fear and anger of those voters. He promised them that he would restore those jobs -- a promise on which he has notably failed to deliver. Here's the reality, though: The financial crisis of 2008 brought our 14 million manufacturing jobs (itself a low plateau from the 17 million in 2000) down to 11.4 million, and 10 years of expansion has only brought us back up to 12.8 million.

But what happened to manufacturing workers will soon happen to retail workers, call center workers, fast food workers, truck drivers and others, as the next Industrial Revolution takes hold of our economy. Bain, a leading consulting firm, projects automation will disrupt jobs at about three times the rate of the Second Industrial Revolution, which sparked thousands of strikes and mass riots at the turn of the 20th century

If you doubt that this is already happening, consider that America's labor participation rate (the ratio of people who are working compared to the total population aged 16 and over) today has fallen to 63%, about the same level as Ecuador and Costa Rica. In the US, almost one out of five prime, working age men have not worked in the past year, and our life expectancy has declined for the past three years, in part due to surges in drug overdoses and suicides. This is before a projected 33% of American malls and retail stores may be forced to shutter their doors, and it might not be long before truck drivers are replaced with self-driving trucks.
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While this appears to be a political speech, it is really about the economic changes that have taken place in the last 50 years or so. And this is important because so many people are affected and cannot find jobs. This last paragraph is very important about working men who have not worked in the last 5 years..