This is half a decade late, but I still own a MATH hat and think about Andrew Yang’s run for president in 2020 occasionally. I don’t know if I’ll ever turn this thought stream into a more refined political essay, but (like much of what I write) I’m planting it here for some catharsis.
Yang MATH is good but impossible
- Planted:
MATH = Make America Think Harder. It was Yang’s 2020 campaign slogan. It’s a clever response to MAGA, and I loved it. I don’t have conviction that UBI would be a resounding net positive, but at least Yang had good ideas, new ideas. Like ranked-choice voting. He was thinking critically about AI before it was a common topic at Thanksgiving. Above all, I thought he would know how to find smart people for each government domain and enable them to think harder and work on new, good ideas. But you can’t make America think harder. And I don’t mean that from some liberal ivory tower like, “oh you can’t make uneducated Americans think harder because they aren’t capable.” I mean that it’s unrealistic to expect adults in aggregate to allocate considerable time to thinking hard about who they’ll vote for, or politics broadly. Adults are expected to accumulate expertise in their own job (obviously) plus something like expertise in parenting, finances, health and nutrition, car maintenance, home ownership, etc. There just isn’t much spare time. I’m not some always-on politico myself. This isn’t a brand new observation, of course. Plenty of people have written about the attention economy and where attention goes nowadays. It’s probably a lot worse now because media is more fragmented (80% of people in DC subscribed to the Post in the 1990s), but some version of this problem has likely always existed.