They also generally tell similar stories: unemployment-related indicators move together (and have been stable over the pa
It’s not clear what he means by “update the numbers,” given the metrics he describes are either vague (what’s Childhood Success Rate?) or already reported by government agencies, studied by economists, and covered by the media.
They also generally tell similar stories: unemployment-related indicators move together (and have been stable over the past few years), and absolute indicators like income (adjusted for inflation to capture living standards) and life expectancy have improved over the long run and are now at all-time highs. Illicit substance use is generally falling too, with the exception of opioids and (non-problematically) cannabis.
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Source: Author’s calculations from FRED data (U6 first became available in 1994). Yang frequently cites LFPR, but since this includes people seeking work, it’s less relevant to unemployment discussions than the employment-population ratio (EPOP, the inverse of which is the top dark red line).
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Source: Author’s calculations from FRED data. Median personal income and life expectancy are only available through 2016, but real GDP per capita has continued to rise to a record high in Q4 2018.
Especially notable here is the longer life expectancy, given Yang also said in the interview that “our life expectancy has declined for the last three years, first time in a hundred years.” This decline should raise alarm about the need for public policy addressing the opioids and suicides explaining it, and Yang has noted this elsewhere. But we shouldn’t miss the forest through the trees: life expectancy fell by two months from 2014 to 2016, while it grew by that much every year from 1990 to 2014.
Could greater funding for statistical agencies generate more valuable insights for policymakers to improve American lives? Of course. But there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater: the currently available statistics tell us that Americans are richer and healthier in recent years than they’ve ever been.
Feeding into the Trump-Carlson narrative
Absent policy prescriptions, Yang’s vision of America doesn’t look so different from the one Donald Trump described as a presidential candidate in 2016. Yang calls the unemployment rate “completely misleading;” Trump called it a “hoax.” Yang cites the slight anomalous fall in life expectancy despite long-run improvement; Trump cited a slight anomalous increase in crime despite a long-run fall. Yang warns of the labor devastation from automation; Trump warned of immigrants taking jobs.
Certainly, Yang’s arguments hold more water than Trump’s: he hasn’t claimed the “real” unemployment rate was as high as 42 percent; the trend in life expectancy has more real basis than the crime blip; and automation really has produced more clear job losses than immigration. And while this interview skipped policy implications, Yang’s proposal for universal basic income is productive and future-oriented, not hateful and backwards-looking like Trump’s border wall.
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Source: Pew Research
And yet, if he’s being trotted on Fox News to back up their host’s warnings of “the dangers of big tech” and “why [we should] be worried about automation,” and if that host describes him as “one of the only people [he’s] ever met who’s honest about the effects of deindustrialization,” it’s important that he’s describing those effects truthfully. Given Carlson’s racist fearmongering of Latin American immigration, it’s especially important that comparisons of labor market indicators between the United States and Latin American countries are valid.