2020 Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has made headlines before with his speeches and visionary campaign ideas. In addition to promoting healthy living and a proposed universal stipend for every citizen, he also touts the novel notion of human-centered capitalism.
Human-centered capitalism calls for the government to refocus on human wellbeing, not GDP growth, as the go-to metric of economic success. Yang ultimately believes that the fundamentals of traditional capitalism are in the process of breaking down and we need to focus on how it can now work at improving our lives rather than stressing us all out.
As written in his book The War on Normal People, Yang defines human-centered capitalism as “Our economic system must shift to focus on bettering the lot of the average person. Capitalism has to be made to serve human ends and goals, rather than have our humanity subverted to serve the marketplace. We shape the system. We own it, not the other way around.”
Truly amazing @AndrewYang! Welcome back and BRAVO!! pic.twitter.com/KWJRohYO6c
— Samir Becic (@SamirBecic) February 8, 2020
He has said in interviews before: “What we can do, ideally, is channel the energies of capitalism towards our own well-being, towards our own health and life expectancy, our mental health and freedom from substance abuse, how clean our air and water are, how our kids are doing. And then if we had different measurements, aside from stock market prices and GDP, then we could take the best of capitalism and turn it towards things that we can all get excited about. So that’s the vision of what I call human capitalism that I would pitch.”
