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The first that I heard about Andrew Yang was something like this: a supporter of universal basic income (UBI) wants to become the President of the United States, and has written a book in favour of the idea.

I confess I was a bit sceptical. Most books written by aspiring politicians are lightweight.

However, it turns out that to describe the book Yang has written as simply a book about UBI, is to vastly understate its scope and the power. I’ve just finished listening to the audio version of it, and I’m very impressed.

Yes, the book says sensible, thoughtful things about the likely advantages of UBI, and how it might be paid for. But it says much more than that.

The title of the book is “The war on normal people”. These “normal people” are ones with statistically median characteristics – median education levels, median income, median family circumstances, and so on. These aren’t the people who tend to congregate in the parts of the USA where the economy is still doing well – such as New York, Boston, Silicon Valley, and Seattle. As Yang highlights in chapter after chapter of grim but compelling reading, the prospects for these normal people are bad – if trends continue on their current trajectories.

Yang has an impressive CV of activities he undertook prior to announcing his interest in becoming President. Here’s an extract from his online biography:

I’m not a career politician—I’m an entrepreneur who understands the economy. It’s clear to me, and to many of the nation’s best job creators, that we need to make an unprecedented change, and we need to make it now. But the establishment isn’t willing to take the necessary bold steps…

I was born in upstate New York in 1975. My parents immigrated from Taiwan in the 1960s and met in grad school. My Dad was a researcher at IBM—he generated 69 patents over his career—and my Mom was the systems administrator at a local university. My brother and I grew up pretty nerdy. We also grew up believing in the American Dream—it’s why my parents came here.

I studied economics and political science at Brown and went to law school at Columbia. After a brief stint as a corporate lawyer, I realized it wasn’t for me. I launched a small company in the early days of the internet that didn’t work out, and then worked for a healthcare startup, where I learned how to build a business from more experienced entrepreneurs. In my thirties, I ran a national education company that grew to become #1 in the country. I also met my wife, Evelyn, and got married. My education company was acquired, and with Evelyn’s support, I decided to take my earnings and committed myself to creating jobs in cities hit hard by the financial crisis. By that time I understood the power of entrepreneurship to generate economic growth, so I founded Venture for America (VFA), an organization that helps entrepreneurs create jobs in cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.

VFA resonates with so many people because it’s clear there’s a growing problem in the U.S.: automation is destroying jobs and entire regions are being left behind. For years I believed new business formation was the answer—if we could train a new generation of entrepreneurs and create the right jobs in the right places, we could stop the downward spiral of growing income inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness. VFA created jobs by the thousands and continues to do amazing work across the country. But along the way, it became clear to me that job creation will not outpace the massive impending job loss due to automation. Those days are simply over.

Yang draws on many of his personal experiences in the book. He describes how, despite lots of good intentions from existing political and social leaders, much of the interior of the USA has been heading steadily downhill. The fixes that are often proposed, such as retraining people from one career skillset to another – aren’t going to work on the scale needed.

Hence Yang’s summary:

I fear for the future of our country. New technologies – robots, software, artificial intelligence – have already destroyed more than 4 million US jobs, and in the next 5-10 years, they will eliminate millions more. A third of all American workers are at risk of permanent unemployment. And this time, the jobs will not come back.

Despite the depressing analysis in the opening two thirds of the book, the final sections are full of what I see as credible optimism.

Here’s his headline vision:

As president, my first priority will be to implement Universal Basic Income for every American adult between the ages of 18 and 64: $1,000 a month, no strings attached, paid for by a new tax on the companies benefiting most from automation.

However – of key importance – Yang’s book makes clear that he understands that the financial payments are only a small part of the transformation that needs to be taken.

UBI is just the beginning. A crisis is underway—we have to work together to stop it, or risk losing the heart of our country. The stakes have never been higher.

Yang makes lots of interesting proposals about changes to communities (including systems of “digital social credits”), healthcare, and education. These build on his own experiences within the healthcare and education industries, and resonate with my personal observations from my own career. For example, Yang urges that we shouldn’t think of education and being primarily about preparing someone for employment. Instead, it should be about the development of character.

Anyone else considering running for political office would do well to compare their vision with that of Andrew Yang. I wish him the best of success.