7 | The War on Normal People by Andrew Yang

I am literally the worst about these posts right now. I've been reading more, but with all the COVID-19 stuff going on, I haven't had time or access to my computer to write these posts. So, here we go: week 12 and review 7... Grace!

In light of the upcoming 2020 US Presidential Election, I thought it would be fun to read a book by one of Trump's (now former) challengers, Andrew Yang. Throughout the debates, I was always interested in his POV on things because his campaign seemed considerably more moderate than many of his left-wing competitors and the problems he discussed seemed so much more relevant than what we typically hear from politicians.

As a disclaimer, this post is not meant to push his viewpoint or anything political like that; it is merely another review of one of my (hopefully) 52 books for the year!

THE WAR ON NORMAL PEOPLE | ANDREW YANG



The book's full title includes a subtitle: The Truth about America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income is our Future. Everything about this title is provocative! It is challenging the current way we understand our changing economy and suggesting a completely different economic system (i.e., replacing the idea that money is the measure of a healthy economy with the idea that healthy people are). Yang divides the book into three main parts: 1. What's happening to jobs? 2. What's happening to us? 3. Solutions and Human Capitalism.

The first section discusses automation and how the "normal" American will be affected by it. Honestly, I expected to hear more about Amazon in this section as that is what Yang spends the bulk of his speeches discussing. First, he describes what exactly he means by "normal:"

"The normal American did not graduate from college and doesn't have an associate's degree. He or she perhaps attended college for one year or graduated from high school. She or he has a net worth of approximately $36K--about $6K excluding home or vehicle equity--and lives paycheck to paycheck. She or he has less than $500 in flexible savings and minimal assets invested in the stock market. These are median statistics, with 50 percent of Americans below these levels."

As is typical throughout the book, Yang showed considerable data supporting these claims in the form of graphs, charts, and quotes from experts. Reading about the "normal" American really did a lot to open my eyes to my own affluence and privilege. I have felt very average as far as academic or economic success, but as a family with 2 master's degrees and a home I can see we live in a different world than a lot of other Americans. For a lot of my life I have felt like people who can't afford a $500 expense need to improve their money management skills, but this notion of "normal" helped me see things from a different point of view.

My biggest take away from this sections was his analysis of how the 5 largest occupations in the US--office and administrative support, sales and retail, food preparation and serving, transportation and material moving, and production--which employ 68 out of 140 million Americans (i.e., 48.5 percent) are going to be impacted by automation. Many of these jobs are comprised of tasks that are "highly repetitive and automatable."

The main job category Yang is concerned about is the 3.5 million-worker trucking industry. With self-driving trucks less than a decade away, Yang argues that trucking is not long for this country. What's worse, is that "as many as 7.2 million workers serve the needs of truck drivers at truck stops, diners, motels, and other businesses around the country." That is a total of over 10 million people who would be devastated by this kind of progress in automation. Imagine a world where these jobs dry up in under a year or two as companies make the changes necessary to save money and increase their bottom line!

I was surprised to continue reading about the potential for automation to impact even white collar jobs, such as counseling, practicing medicine, financial advising, etc. Honestly, in the grim world Yang is depicting, it seems as though the only jobs that are safe are technology development.

In part two, Yang discusses how these changes are and will impact humanity. Among other things, he discusses the consolidation of the wealthy in six major cities and the impact of unemployment and underemployment--particularly on men; however, what stood out most to me was his discussion on mindsets of scarcity and abundance.

"Scarcity has a profound impact on one's worldview. Eldar Shafir, a Princeton psychologist, and Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard economist, conducted a series of studies on the effects of various forms of scarcity on the poor. They found that poor people and well-off people perform very similarly on tests of fluid intelligence, a generalized measurement that corresponds to IQ. But if each group was forced to consider how to pay an unexpected car bill of $3,000 just before taking the test, the poor group would underperform by the equivalent of 13 IQ points, almost one full standard deviation. ... Activating scarcity through a hypothetical expense was also found to reduce correct responses on a self-control test from 83 to 63 percent among the less well-off participants, with no effect on the well-off. A mindset of scarcity is more than just 'stress'--it actually makes one less rational and more impulsive by consuming bandwidth."

I think seeing this study, along with several others he included, in concert with his definition of who the statistically normal American is really convicted me of some judgments and prejudices I have held toward people who are poorer than I am. What do you think about these ideas?

The final section of The War on Normal People discusses some of Yang's solutions to these problems: Universal Basic Income (AKA the Freedom Dividend), Medicare for All, Social Credits, and Human Capitalism. His main principles guiding this plan are 1) Humanity is more important than money. 2) The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar. and 3) Markets exist to serve our common goals and values. I think these three principles could be developed a bit for clarity, but on the whole I support the premise of elevating the value of a human above the value of dollars. While some of his strategies and solutions are very interesting to me, as a fiscal conservative, I still have a good deal to wrap my mind around. In conclusion, Yang exhorts us:

"The age of automation will lead to many very bad things. But it will also potentially push us to delve more deeply into what makes us human. ... Through all of the doubt, the cynicism, the ridicule, the hatred and anger, we must fight for the world that is still possible. ... What makes you human? The better world is still possible. Come fight with me."

This book left me feeling a bit grim about the future to be honest; however, it also left me with a sense of urgency to love and serve those around me and to seek out and support elected officials who want to do the same.

Conclusion: Would read parts again for reference. Would recommend to a select audience. 7/10.

I'm thinking of reading Milton Freedman's Free to Choose next to get a conservative perspective on the economy. You know what they say... "The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him." Proverbs 18:17

6 | Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

I know what you're thinking: Boy, Jenn, you're off to a great start by taking off all of February! (Is it rude to assume that my readers--that probably don't even exist--are passive aggressive?) Confession: Between a car accident and a sick baby, it took me all of February to read a not-very-long memoir. There's grace for that, right? (Read: a series of short books are coming soon--haha!)

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is a tale of an older man who takes a twelve-year-old girl captive for two years and rapes her. This is a demented idea, but, as Azar Nafisi draws out, it has something profound to say about humanity in general. Reading Lolita is a provocative idea in general, but the idea of reading it in Tehran is altogether outlandish! When I saw this book in one of the little free libraries in Fort Worth (anyone else love these little give-a-book-take-a-book stops?) I was instantly intrigued!

Before taking it home, I read the author's synopsis on the back cover: It detailed a weekly gathering of women who secretly studied literature in Tehran. Always having dreamt of participating in a book club, I knew a historical novel about a book club of rebellious women was right up my alley! (As an aside, does anyone want to join a book club with me?)

READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN | AZAR NAFISI



Nafisi begins by explaining that no novel can ever truly represent a reality. Instead, novels--good ones, anyway--reflect truths that apply much more broadly to the human condition. This book is made up of several parts, each named to reflect another book. Part I is entitled "Lolita." She notes that of any work of fiction, Lolita is the one that best encompasses life inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. This book, but more precisely the entire corpus of Nabokov's works, shape the first part of Nafisi's novel. She answers the question: Why Lolita in Tehran?

"I want to emphasize ... that we were not Lolita, the Ayatollah was not Humbert and this republic was not a critique of the Islamic Republic, but it went against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives." She goes on to say, "The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by a dirty man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another."

The ideas Nafisi draws out of Nabokov's Lolita, among other works, relate to Nafisi's own struggle to cope with her situation in Tehran. Nafisi takes hold of Nabokov's Lolita and An Invitation to a Beheading and shows how what really happens in the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor is the loss of the individuality of the oppressed--this is what is being taken from women in Tehran, she argues. Her students struggle with a class between who they want to be, who they are in the "magical" living room the literature class meets in, and who they are forced to be in public, hidden under veils and robes.

"The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other."

The only way for the oppressed to escape becoming identified only as the oppressor sees her is to hold fast to the subtle idiosyncrasies that make her herself. As far as I can tell, this is the purpose of the literature class: it is an opportunity for the participants to remember what makes them who they are, even underneath the thick black robes of the totalitarian regime.

As someone who is not held under a totalitarian regime, I think my big take away from this section of the book is that in the mundane routine of life, which can at times seem particularly repetitive and deterministic as a stay at home mom, it is important to hang on to things that make you take hold of who you are. For me, that has been music, art, embroidery, reading, and writing! As simple as this blog is, it helps me maintain my grasp on what makes me me!

I spent a considerable amount of time on part one of the text, as Lolita is the book Nafisi says most describes the Islamic Republic of Iran; however, in hopes of this post being a readable length, I will be more brief in summarizing the remaining three sections.

Part two of the book takes us back in time and is perhaps even more fascinating than part one--it is about Nafisi's experience as a professor at the U of Tehran during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, told through the lens of The Great Gatsby. My husband and I are total nerds; we just watched a documentary about the change in power from the Shah to the Ayatollah, so it was exciting to read a first-hand account of it!

During a lecture series at the U of Tehran, Nafisi explains to her students that Gatsby is best described by the unifying theme of loss--specifically, the loss of a dream. She relates Gatsby's ultimate demise to the future she foresaw for Iran:

"He [Gatsby] wanted to fulfill his past dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?"

The last two sections of the book, on James and Austen, struck me for a few reasons. Both emphasized the unique role of a heroine who is not what one might expect. Daisy Miller, for example, is James' heroine who possesses none of the desired qualities of a protagonist: she is unattractive, of less than average intelligence, and other unamiable qualities you may be imagining. At the same time, the antagonists had very attractive qualities. So, how did Daisy Miller manage to be the protagonist? Empathy. This is the trait that makes a good protagonist and, according to Nafisi, a good novel. I've never thought about this in such explicit terms before, but I tend to agree.

Nafisi also showed how James and Austen used quite mundane scenarios to set their novels; this is quite a turn from the racy Nabokov or the flamboyant Fitzgerald. The villains don't appear as boldly as Humbert in Lolita, but they create vile scenarios for the protagonist nonetheless.

Part three was one of  the more interesting sections for me to read because Nafisi shared a lot about her experience living under the Islamic Republic's rule, the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Iran after his death. I feel like my understanding of Iran really grew through reading this book and did a lot to open my eyes to different opinions about the Islamic Republic from within Iran. Probably the most impactful way she did this was by talking about her students and the way they survived the changes and restrictions.

Conclusion:
Would read again. Everyone should read this and expand their perspectives on the Middle East and Islamic culture. 9/10.