![]() In an age when many are tired of celebrity politics, no one could accuse Yang of lacking big ideas. It’s going to be disastrous for many Americans and many communities.” So you can imagine what’s going to happen when that number starts to dwindle. I was just in Davenport, Iowa, at the country’s largest truck stop, Iowa 80, and they proudly state that 5,000 people stop there every day. He goes on: “So the hollowing out of the interior of the country is going to be amplified many times over by the automation of freight. It would actually work, unlike the trickle-down economy which was sold to us Andrew Yang This is the trickle-up economy from people, families and communities. ![]() So if you foresee that the truck driving jobs are going to start getting automated away in the next five to 10 years, that’s going to have massive ramifications not just for this 3.5m trucker population but also the 5 million-plus Americans who work in truck stops, motels and diners that rely upon the truckers stopping every day. The financial incentives to do so are massive: $168bn a year in estimated savings, not just from labour costs but equipment utilisation, fuel efficiency, fewer accidents. “On the other side you have some of the smartest engineers in the country working on automating away that job. It’s a very demanding, punishing job, but it’s also one of the surest ways to a middle-class income for a huge number of men. It’s one of the highest-paying jobs for non-college graduates in the US. Yang, armed with a battery of statistics, says: “There are 3.5 million truck drivers, 94% male, average age 49, average education high school or one year of college, and they make about $46,000 a year. Truck driving is the most common job in 29 states in America, according to census data, and a demographic that includes many ex-military servicemen and many Trump voters. Like it or not, self-driving trucks are coming, Yang is certain. “Now we’re about to do the same thing to millions of retail jobs, call centre jobs, fast food jobs and, most destructively, trucking jobs in the coming years … When I talked to other mainstream political candidates, no one seemed to want to focus on the enormity of the reality that’s ahead for America.” He asserts that Trump won the election because the country automated away 4m manufacturing jobs in the critical swing states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri and Iowa. Yang wants to become president so he can do something about it. Yang has written: “I am writing from inside the tech bubble to let you know that we are coming for your jobs.” As it happens, it is an army of automatons conceived and created by tech firms on the coasts and unleashed on middle America, potentially spurring a deepening us versus them mentality. Life expectancy in the US has declined for the past three years for the first time since the flu pandemic of 1918 because of a surge in suicides and drug overdoses, both of which are at record highs, Yang notes.Īnd like a time traveller from the future, Yang has a warning about more to come: the rise of the machines – robots that will put millions of more people out of work. He has no doubts about the gravity of his mission. According to his campaign team, “Yang Gang” chapters have sprung up in more than 35 states. He has raised $250,000 from 14,000 donors in the past week. “The two historical time periods that are comparable to where we are now in terms of polarisation and division are the French Revolution before the revolution and the United States before the civil war,” he said.įew pundits are taking Yang’s candidacy seriously but he certainly is, with multiple trips to Iowa and New Hampshire so far. “I would fly between St Louis and San Francisco, or Michigan and Manhattan, and I would feel like I was traversing dimensions and ways of life rather than just a couple of time zones,” he told the Guardian in Washington this week. Yang, 44, is the founder of Venture for America, a national public service fellowship that places recent graduates in struggling communities. Small towns and rural communitiesare falling further behind, feeding a sense that, to paraphrase LP Hartley, the coasts are a foreign country – they do things differently there.Īndrew Yang, a New York and Silicon Valley entrepreneur and David taking on multiple Goliaths in the Democratic race for the White House in 2020, is here to tell you that it’s about to become much, much worse – and that is why he is running for president. Glittering coastal cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Washington are becoming richer and more influential, attracting more jobs, better hospitals and schools, and technology. This is one vivid illustration of America’s great divide.
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