Andrew Yang Quotes

You have to recognize realistically that AI is qualitatively different from an internal combustion engine in that it was always the case that human imagination, creativity, social interaction, those things were unique to humans and couldn’t be replicated by machines. We are coming close to the point where not only cashiers but surgeons might be at least partially replaced by AI.

The logic of the meritocracy is leading us to ruin, because we are collectively primed to ignore the voices of the millions getting pushed into economic distress by the grinding wheels of automation and innovation. We figure they’re complaining or suffering because they’re losers.

There’s a big distinction between humans as humans and humans as workers. The former are indispensable. The latter may not be.

I learned a lot from the party business — it’s great training for running a business in general. Among the lessons I learned: • The default number of attendees is zero. You get out what you put in. • The personal touch is always best. If you write or call people individually they’ll come. • Don’t throw parties on Mondays or Tuesdays. • Choose your partners wisely. • The best way to get others to come to your party is to go to their parties. Reciprocity rules.* • It’s way easier to invite someone to a party and get them to come than it is to get a date with them. • Don’t save free drink tickets until the end of the night. Use them as soon as possible. • Nothing makes someone happier than skipping a line. • If a party gets too crowded, some people will leave. • When presented with an opportunity to be a jerk or let it go, let it go. • People get irrationally possessive and touchy about free gift bags. • If no one has shown up in the first hour, don’t worry — they’ll show. I got a great education and had some amazing times. If you want to throw a big party, give this a try — find a few people you like and respect but that you’re not that close friends with — people who have networks that are different from the ones you have. Convince them to cohost a party with you. If that works, you’ll be off to the races.

The system rewards activity and output over health improvements and outcomes.

I had several friends from law school who were very enterprising guys, much more so than the average law student. They each started businesses after practicing law at large firms for multiple years. What kind of businesses did they start? They started boutique law firms. This is completely unsurprising if you think about it. They’d spent years becoming good at delivering legal services. It was a field that they understood and could compete in. Their credentials translated too. People learn from what they’re doing and do it again on their own. It’s not just lawyers; the consulting firm Bain and Company was started by seven former partners and managers from the Boston Consulting Group. Myriad boutique investment banks and hedge funds have spun out of large financial organizations. You can see the same pattern in the startup world. After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, its founders and employees went on to found or cofound LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman), YouTube (Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, and Chad Hurley), Yelp (Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman), Tesla Motors (Elon Musk), SpaceX (Musk again), Yammer (David Sacks), 500 Startups (Dave McClure), and many other companies. PayPal’s CEO, Peter Thiel, famously made a $500,000 investment in Facebook that grew to over $1 billion. In this sense, PayPal is one of the most prolific companies of recent times. But if you look at any successful growth company you’ll start to see their alumni show up doing parallel things. Former Apple employees founded or cofounded Android, Palm, Nest, and Handspring, companies that revolve around devices. Former Yahoo! employees founded Ycombinator, Cloudera, Hunch.com, AppNexus, Polyvore, and many other web-oriented companies. Organizations give rise to other organizations like themselves.

All Bowser players are carried.

The ratio of CEO to worker pay rose from 20 to 1 in 1965 to 271 to 1 in 2016.

There are millions of women across the country who are stuck in exploitative or abusive jobs or relationships that would be improved simply by putting $1,000 a month in their hands.

increasing automation accompanied by social ruin. We must make the market serve humanity rather than have humanity continue to serve the market.

I run Venture for America, a nonprofit organization that recruits dozens of our country’s top graduates each year and places them in startups and growth companies in Detroit, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Providence, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and other cities around the country. Our goal is to help create 100,000 new US jobs by 2025. We supply talent to early-stage companies so that they can expand and hire more people. And we train a critical mass of our best and brightest graduates to build enterprises and create new opportunities for themselves and others.

One could argue that it is essential for any democracy to do all it can to keep its population free of a mindset of scarcity in order to make better decisions.

Spending your twenties traveling four days a week, interviewing employees, and writing detailed reports on how to cut costs will change you, as will spending years editing contracts and arguing about events that will never come to pass, or years producing Excel spreadsheets and moving deals along. After a while, regardless of your initial motivations, your lifestyle and personality will change to fit your role.

Scarcity will not save us. Abundance will.

Manhattan Prep started out as one lone tutor in a Starbucks coffee shop. Less than ten years later, it was a leading national education and publishing business that employed over one hundred people and was acquired by a public company for millions of dollars. How did that happen? We delivered a service that customers liked more than what was otherwise available. They sought us out and rewarded us with their business. We hired more people, grew, and kept improving. This process — a new company filling a need and flourishing as a result — is an example of value creation. It’s the fuel of economic growth, and what our country has been seeking a formula for. It’s the process that leads to new businesses and jobs. Value creation has a polar opposite: rent-seeking. In the 1980s, economists began noticing that countries with ample natural resources experienced lower economic growth rates than others. From 1965 to 1998 in the OPEC (oil-producing) countries, gross domestic product per capita decreased on average by 1.3 percent, while in the rest of the developed world, per capita growth increased by 2.2 percent (for an overall difference of 3.5 percent). This was a surprise — if you had lots of oil in the ground, wouldn’t that give you more wealth to invest and thus spur more rapid growth? Economists cited a number of factors to explain this “resource curse,” including internal and external conflict, corruption, lower monitoring of government, lack of diversification, and being subject to higher price volatility. One other possible explanation on offer was that a country’s smart people will wind up going to work in whatever industry is throwing off money (like the oil industry in Saudi Arabia). Thus fewer talented people are innovating in other industries, dragging down the growth rate over time. This makes sense — it’s a lot easier for a gifted Saudi to plug into the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and extract economic value than to come up with a new business o