The subsistence and scarcity model is grinding more and more people up. Preserving it is the thing we must give up first. - Andrew Yang

Our job-based health insurance system does the very thing we most want to avoid — it discourages businesses from hiring.

I often get asked these questions from young people who are considering going to law school: “Do you use your law degree in what you do? Has it helped you?” These are difficult questions to answer succinctly. It’s impossible for me to say that it doesn’t play into my day-to-day activities because law school and briefly practicing law rewired my brain. I’m more structured and detail-oriented than I would have been. Having gone to law school years ago still impacts my job performance every day. Plus, people tended to accord me some professional respect in my twenties in part because I had a high-value graduate degree. It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the impact it’s had. On the other hand, it’s not as if I’m editing contracts or figuring out if something is legal on a regular basis. If I were to come across a genuine legal issue I’d call a lawyer who specializes in that sort of thing or look it up online like anyone else. Legal training (and the subsequent indebtedness) would not be my first suggestion to a young person looking to do something enterprising.* I felt I had to unlearn a lot as I embarked down a very different road.

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.