Last Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang joined Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight for a 5-minute interview.

Last Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang joined Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight for a 5-minute interview. Consistent with his book and platform, Yang warned of a coming wave of job losses due to automation, citing the fall in Midwest manufacturing employment and the 3.5 million truck drivers at risk of replacement by autonomous vehicle technology.

Yang normally uses this premise to motivate his policy prescriptions, especially the Freedom Dividend — a universal basic income funded by a value-added tax — central to his campaign. I support (and have written on) universal basic income, so I appreciate him bringing that issue into the national discourse. But his interview with Carlson showed the dangers of the tenuously-grounded populist frame he’s associating with that policy.

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A recurring misleading claim on labor force participation rate
Carlson introduced Yang by warning of the dangers of automation and technology. After describing self-driving trucks, to back up his assertion that technology is already displacing workers, he said:

Labor force participation rate in the United States is 63.2 percent, the same level as Ecuador and Costa Rica.

This echoes his statements on Twitter and the Joe Rogan Experience, in which he compared the US to El Salvador and Dominican Republic. Yang is referring to the civilian labor force participation rate (LFPR), defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as the share of people age 16 or older who are working or actively seeking work. It’s hovered around 63 percent since 2013, down from 67 percent around 2000, and the most recent data is from January 2019 at 63.2 percent.

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Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve
Data from the World Bank differs slightly from BLS (age 15+ instead of 16+, and as of 2018) but shows that the US LFPR is about in the middle of the pack (61.6 percent, higher than 46 percent of countries). While it’s similar to El Salvador, it’s substantially lower than Ecuador and Dominican Republic, and somewhat higher than Costa Rica. The United Kingdom and South Korea are both more similar to the United States than most of the countries Yang lists.

Source: Author’s calculations from World Bank data
The bigger problem is that LFPR is largely a function of demographics, especially the number of retirees. The higher life expectancy in the US combined with Social Security and Medicare means that more people live long enough to spend their later years out of the labor force. Indeed, Americans can expect to live considerably longer than residents of Ecuador, El Salvador and Dominican Republic.

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Source: Author’s calculations from World Bank data
A straightforward way to correct for this bias is to limit the population to people in more typical working ages. For example, the US BLS defines “prime-age” LFPR as LFPR among people aged 25–54, to account for young people being in school and early retirement. This has been rising since 2015, and is currently 82.6 percent, within 2 percentage points of its all-time high in 1997.

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Source: FRED
25–54 LFPR isn’t available across countries, but limiting to age 15–64 puts the US alongside France and Hong Kong, and higher than all four of Yang’s comparison countries, even though we have far more young people in college. Unlike 15+ LFPR, 15–64 LFPR also significantly correlates to both GDP per capita and life expectancy.

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Source: Author’s calculations from World Bank data
Life expectancy and metrics other than GDP
With Carlson, Yang continued:

We have a series of bad numbers and I referred to GDP as one certainly, a headline unemployment rate is completely misleading and one of my mandates as president is I’m going to update the numbers [so] they actually make sense.

Yang expounds on this in his Human-Centered Capitalism policy page — one of his top three objectives, along with the Freedom Dividend and Medicare for All— saying that as President he would:

Change the way we measure the economy, from GDP and the stock market to…new measurements like Median Income and Standard of Living, Health-adjusted Life Expectancy, Mental Health, Childhood Success Rates, Social and Economic Mobility, Absence of Substance Abuse, and other measurements.