Top 35 Andrew Yang Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The market doesn’t care what’s best for us.”

— Andrew Yang

2. “The best approach is what they do at the Cleveland Clinic – doctors simply get paid flat salaries.”

— Andrew Yang

3. “Knowing what’s truly normal or average in a big country like America requires some work.”

— Andrew Yang

4. “The challenge we must overcome is that humans need work more than work needs us.”

— Andrew Yang

5. “Our lack of family leave for new parents is barbaric, antifamily, sexist, regressive, economically irrational, and just plain stupid.”

— Andrew Yang

6. “Time only flows in one direction, and progress is a good thing as long as its benefits are shared.”

— Andrew Yang

7. “In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, trust, and cohesion – the stuff of civilization – are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship.”

— Andrew Yang

8. “There is limited or no market reward at present for keeping families together, upgrading infrastructure, lifelong education, preventative care, or improving democracy.”

— Andrew Yang

9. “So the average American worker has less than an associate’s degree and makes about $17 per hour.”

— Andrew Yang

10. “The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth.”

— Andrew Yang

11. “The system rewards activity and output over health improvements and outcomes.”

— Andrew Yang

12. “That is, if we’re not good for work, is work good for us?”

— Andrew Yang

13. “College is being dramatically overprescribed and oversold as the answer to all of our job-related economic problems.”

— Andrew Yang

14. “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. Without their structure and support, people suffer psychologically and socially, as well as financially and even physically.”

— Andrew Yang

15. “Scarcity will not save us. Abundance will.”

— Andrew Yang

16. “Capitalism has to be made to serve human ends and goals, rather than have our humanity subverted to serve the marketplace.”

— Andrew Yang

17. “The United States should provide an annual income of $12,000 for each American aged 18–64, with the amount indexed to increase with inflation.”

— Andrew Yang

18. “People were clapping us on the back, congratulating us on our accomplishments, and we were thinking to ourselves, What are you congratulating us for? The problems are just getting worse.”

— Andrew Yang

19. “Some of the winners in the current system would make less money in the new world even as patient care improves.”

— Andrew Yang

20. “The future without jobs will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max.”

— Andrew Yang

21. “The subsistence and scarcity model is grinding more and more people up. Preserving it is the thing we must give up first.”

— Andrew Yang

22. “But more profoundly, there is something deeply wrong if even the winners of the mass scramble to climb into the top of the education meritocracy are so unhappy. They are asking, “What are we striving and struggling for?” No one knows. The answer seems to be “to try to join the tribes in the coastal markets and work your ass off,” even as those opportunities become harder to come by. If you don’t like that answer, there are very few others.”

— Andrew Yang

23. “Intelligence and character aren’t the same things at all. Pretending that they are will lead us to ruin.”

— Andrew Yang

24. “The logic of the meritocracy is leading us to ruin, because we are collectively primed to ignore the voices of the millions getting pushed into economic distress by the grinding wheels of automation and innovation. We figure they’re complaining or suffering because they’re losers.”

— Andrew Yang

25. “There’s a big distinction between humans as humans and humans as workers. The former are indispensable. The latter may not be.”

— Andrew Yang

26. “Capital doesn’t care about us.”

— Andrew Yang

27. “Personal qualities today are increasingly marginalized in favor of technocratic, market-driven skills. Instead, finance is the new courage, branding is the new compassion, and coding is the new contemplation.”

— Andrew Yang

28. “One could argue that it is essential for any democracy to do all it can to keep its population free of a mindset of scarcity in order to make better decisions.”

— Andrew Yang

29. “The revolution will happen either before or after the breakdown of society. We must choose before.”

— Andrew Yang

30. “It is impossible to overstate the importance of truck drivers to regional economies around the country.”

— Andrew Yang

31. “Our fixation on college readiness leads our high school curricula toward purely academic subjects and away from life skills.”

— Andrew Yang

32. “The market rewards business leaders for making things more efficient. Efficiency doesn’t love normal people.”

— Andrew Yang

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

— Andrew Yang

34. “There’s a very popular notion out there that ideas change the world. That’s wrong. People change the world.”

— Andrew Yang

35. “Are we not, as the citizens of the United States, the owners of this country?”

— Andrew Yang

36. “America is starting 100,000 fewer businesses per year than it was only 12 years ago, and is in the midst of shedding millions of jobs due primarily to technological advances.”

— Andrew Yang