Andrew Yang for president! Oh, wait…

In How to Build a Better American Economy, Andrew Yang lays out a vision for the future that actually sounds … inspiring. Can you imagine? It’s been awhile since I felt hope for what lies ahead.

[…] these problems [are] big, and we need to start setting the next generations up for success while cleaning up our messes. But we can tackle them all with the same solution — rebuilding our economy and country with a massive and ongoing public works program.

To do it, we must build a human-centered economy, making sure it works for our children by ensuring that it stops working exclusively for those at the top. Our winner-take-all economy has resulted in a country where, according to a 2017 CareerBuilder/Harris Poll survey of nearly 3,500 workers, 40 percent of people report usually living paycheck to paycheck. Forty percent of Americans also say they would have difficulty affording an unexpected $400 bill — and that was before the pandemic.

A more human-centered economy wields the positives of capitalism to maximize human well-being and flourishing, instead of solely investment returns. I like to say human-centered capitalism has three basic principles: Humans are more important than money; markets exist to serve our common goals and values; we should be using human-based metrics to determine success, not money-based ones.”

We need to start measuring the right things in order to make sure our economy is geared toward maximizing our health and well-being. Instead of stock market prices, we should be maximizing our quality of life, health, mental health, childhood success rates, and environmental sustainability.

We don’t exist to serve the economy. It’s the other way around. It’s time to rebuild our country and stop failing both ourselves and the next generation. We must put ourselves to work, improving our way of life and investing in our people on a historic scale — only if we do can we begin to right the imbalances we built for decades.