Thoughts on The War on Normal People

Did you know that millions of people outside of the USofA follow American elections even though they don't participate in them? Do you know why this is a thing? It's pretty simple, the USA is in such a powerful position worldwide that the result of their elections tends to matter a lot to their own countries (sometimes even more than their elections).

I am one of those people, I follow them and have a lot of fun doing so. At some point last year Andrew Yang started popping into multiple of my feeds as a candidate, I didn't know much about him, no one did really, so I mostly ignored him. But Andrew is not someone you can ignore for long and after a while, I ended up taking the bait.

I would like to say my first full exposure to him and his ideas was on the Joe Rogan podcast but I'm not entirely sure about it - what I'm sure about is that as soon as I started listening to his ideas I knew I was hooked. Everything clicked - THIS is the guy the world needs right now - Smart, Tech Savy, and most importantly, NOT a dinosaur. You could say I got hooked into the yang gang immediately even though I had no business being there but that's just the power of Yang. The Rest is history, we all know what happened next...

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Fast forward to last week when I decided to finally pick up The War on Normal People. It was an enjoyable read and it outlines quite well his ideas and intentions. It also helped paint a clearer picture of everything he did during his run but it also was a premise of what went wrong.

Market-driven capitalism has led technology to shake up the entirety of the American economy and with that it is setting the US and the world for a never seen before cultural shake up and economic crisis.

Right now during the coronavirus pandemic we are experiencing a small scale of what the future of mass automatization and unemployment could be if we run straight into it unprepared. Andrew summarized the current situation well in a tweet a couple of weeks ago - He said something along the lines of "I should have talked about pandemics and not robots" but that would have probably not worked as well in my opinion!

Not everything is a negative - Thanks to the spotlight Andrew had, new contenders are rising to fight for the ideas he spread and brought into the mainstream and even though I am a pessimist at heart - I hold some hope for a future with human capitalism that values health and well being over financial gains.

If you are given a choice between lowering the ceiling or raising the floor, You should always raise the floor...