What the Market Wants (or, The Worth of a Person)

I had dinner with a friend recently. He’s a social media influencer – he has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and a similar number on YouTube.

“Man, I need to reinvent myself,” he shared. “My videos aren’t performing as well as they used to.” He went viral a number of years ago for some humor videos – I sensed that he had been trying to recapture the magic ever since.

I commented to him, “Yeah, same with me, same with me” to be supportive and relatable. I found myself glad – for the millionth time – that I’m not directly reliant upon views, clicks and impressions to pay the rent and feed my family.

Back in 2014, I was the CEO of Venture for America, an entrepreneurship org that I’d founded three years earlier. I wrote my first book – “Smart People Should Build Things” – that year to promote the ideas behind the org. I was paid $55,000, which was a healthy advance for a first-time author. It felt awesome to get paid anything to put pen to paper. My agent said that I should join then Twitter, which I did in December of 2013.

Still, that $55,000 less 15% for my agent’s fees wasn’t exactly life-changing money. It was more of a super-pleasant bonus on top of my non-profit salary.

When Smart People Should Build Things came out, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m sure just about every author harbors the hope that YOUR book becomes a big deal or bestseller.

It didn’t.

It did fine, but it didn’t set the world on fire.

Most books don’t. Blog posts, either.

I still felt good about it – like I had something I wanted to express and put out into the world. Anytime someone told me they liked my book it felt like gold.

If there’s one major idea that has been animating me for the past 8 – or 25 – years, it’s been that the marketplace doesn’t get a lot of things right.

I left a high-paying corporate job at age 25. I took a big pay cut to try to co-found a business. My bank account took a hit, but the nature of the work I was doing improved.

That company flopped, so I felt like a failure for a while. I learned, and later became CEO of a company that did well. But it’s not like I became a better or smarter person when the market started to value my actions more.

When I was running for President, I put it in stark terms: “My wife Evelyn is at home with our children, one of whom is autistic. What does the marketplace value her work at? Zero. But we all know that’s perverse, that the work she’s doing is among the most important work there is.”

What the market says about what we’re worth will become more dramatically wrong in the AI age. AI is about to expunge millions of jobs. It doesn’t matter if you’re a smart and conscientious call center worker or an Uber driver or a lazy, unmotivated one – AI will replace both in equal fashion. People who studied for years to become an accountant or lawyer will see their training become obsolete in a matter of weeks.

This was the primary theme of “The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income is our Future,” which I wrote in 2018. TWoNP was the basis of my presidential campaign that took me to seven presidential debate stages – thank you! - and the screens of tens of millions. It argues for a human-centered economy that would start by alleviating poverty at scale.

My fear at the time was that, as the market zeroes out the worth of our labor and time, we would turn on each other, fueled by tribalism and polarization. A two-sided political system wouldn’t help.

That seems pretty spot-on.

I set out to improve the situation by starting Forward, which hopes to bring people together and get us beyond the current us vs. them conflict narrative that naturally dehumanizes us. Humanity Forward continues to advocate for various anti-poverty policies here and now. And Noble Mobile is working to reduce people’s screentime and get consumers more money.

The challenge remains: how do we value people intrinsically in a way that’s distinct from the numbers that the market assigns to both us and our time? As I wrote in TWoNP: “We are more than the numbers on our paychecks – and we are going to have to prove it very quickly.”

Did you know that Noble Mobile users use 15 – 20% less screen time AND typically cut their wireless bills by 50%? Go to noblemobile.com/yang for 3 months off your wireless bill, the best deal around. Offlineparty.com is coming to Miami, DC, and SF next. My new book “Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?” comes out in February and the tour dates are up here starting in New York on Thursday! Use code ‘UBIUBI’ for 25% off the book. Maybe it’ll become a bestseller. Or not. Whatever, it’s cool.