Andrew Yang Quotes

We are the purpose of the economy, not its fuel.

On the flip side, it’s brutal trying to pull together the right people if you have someone around early on who doesn’t generate a high degree of confidence, enthusiasm, and respect. Cultures get built from the beginning, and whoever joins a company takes cues from whoever’s already there.

Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, argues that if a cashier’s job were a video game, we would call it completely mindless and the worst game ever designed. But if it’s called a job, politicians praise it as dignified and meaningful. Hunnicutt observes that “Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy — all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job.” Most jobs today are a means for survival.

popular notion out there that ideas change the world. That’s wrong. People change the world. People making commitments and sacrifices and doing something about the forces that are tearing our society apart. Whom do we serve, Humanity or the Market? Are we the opiated

We must make the market serve humanity rather than have humanity continue to serve the market.

Upon joining Venture for America, we ask our fellows to adopt the following credo: My career is a choice that indicates my values. There is no courage without risk. Value creation is how I measure achievement. I will create opportunity for myself and others. I will act with integrity in all things.

We are getting better and better at things that will make large numbers of workers extraneous. And we will succeed. There needs to be a dramatic reskilling of the workforce, but that’s not going to be practical for a lot of people. It’s impossible to avoid a lost generation of workers.

One Stanford op-ed in particular was picked up by the national press and inspired a website, Stop the Brain Drain, which protested the flow of talent to Wall Street. The Stanford students wrote, The financial industry’s influence over higher education is deep and multifaceted, including student choice over majors and career tracks, career development resources, faculty and course offerings, and student culture and political activism. In 2010, even after the economic crisis, the financial services industry drew a full 20 percent of Harvard graduates and over 15 percent of Stanford and MIT graduates. This represented the highest portion of any industry except consulting, and about three times more than previous generations. As the financial industry’s profits have increasingly come from complex financial products, like the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that ignited the 2008 financial meltdown, its demand has steadily grown for graduates with technical degrees. In 2006, the securities and commodity exchange sector employed a larger portion of scientists and engineers than semiconductor manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. The result has been a major reallocation of top talent into financial sector jobs, many of which are “socially useless,” as the chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority put it. This over-allocation reduces the supply of productive entrepreneurs and researchers and damages entrepreneurial capitalism, according to a recent Kauffman Foundation report. Many of these finance jobs contribute to volatile and counter-productive financial speculation. Indeed, Wall Street’s activities are largely dominated by speculative security trading and arbitrage instead of investment in new businesses. In 2010, 63 percent of Goldman Sachs’ revenue came from trading, compared to only 13 percent from corporate finance. Why are graduates flocking to Wall Street? Beyond the simple allure of high salaries, investment banks and he

Of course, some young people dislike the conformity and yearn for a sense of choice and exploration. One college senior at Princeton remarked to me, “Once you’re here, you become awfully risk-averse. It’s more about not failing than doing anything in particular.” Another said, “I’m so busy here. I’d love some time to think,” as if thinking and college didn’t belong in the same sentence.

The top 1 percent have accrued 52 percent of the real income growth in America since 2009.

When I applied to college in 1992, my parents were pumped that I got into Stanford and Brown, schools that had acceptance rates of 21 and 23 percent, respectively, at the time. Today, the acceptance rates at those schools are only 4.8 percent and 9.3 percent. What was once very difficult now requires planning and cultivation from birth.

We’ve let the market dictate what our smart kids do, and they’re being systematically funneled into obvious, structured paths that don’t serve them or the economy terribly well.

As we’ve seen, up to 25 percent of employed seniors from our top universities are heading to financial services each year. Our financial services industry (and to a lesser extent its attendant legal industry) plays an equivalent role to the oil industry in Saudi Arabia in terms of talent attraction. You can see a similar dynamic at work in other fields with fixed slots. There were 682 orthopedic surgery residents in the United States in 2012. That number is set because there are only so many funded residency slots in teaching hospital programs throughout the country.4 If I were to kick butt in medical school and get one of these residencies, I would be on the way to becoming an orthopedic surgeon, probably the most coveted residency due to money, lifestyle, low morbidity of patients, gratification from restoring mobility, and other factors. But let’s say that I didn’t make it and fell short — there would still be 682 orthopedic surgeons five years from now because the next guy would have gotten that slot. We’re all competing to fit through the same finite gate. The value difference if I perform really strongly and get one of these coveted spots is not one more surgeon — it’s the gap between me and the 683rd person who didn’t get it (and perhaps went into a less prestigious or less lucrative specialty). From a value creation standpoint, it’s not ideal for a massive level of talent to be going to existing enterprises that have captured large economic rents or where people are fighting for a set of finite slots. The rents and slots will stay essentially constant. Contrast this with new business formation. If I were to say, “There are only going to be 682 new successful businesses started in the United States next year,” people would instantly regard that as ridiculous. It’s unknown and unknowable. But we all know that if another enterprising team comes along and starts a cool company, that number goes up by one.

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.

We are constantly asked to choose between family and function, and fear that if we let up for even a little while our race will be lost. Women choose between time with their children — or having children — and keeping their job. Men choose between life on the road and being bypassed. Children get used to seeing one parent routinely, or maybe no parent at all.