Andrew Yang: ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ Could Cause ‘Mass Riots’

Presidential candidate Andrew Yang said on Wednesday that he worries that the fourth industrial revolution will lead to “mass riots” across the country if more workers become displaced because of automation.

Speaking in New Hampshire at the Politics and Eggs Breakfast at Saint Anselm College, Yang said that studies done by MIT and former President Barack Obama’s White House have found that the fourth industrial revolution will be “two to three times faster and more impactful than the previous industrial revolution at the turn of the century.”

Yang pointed out that various studies have found that “between 20 and 40 percent of American jobs are potentially subject to automation in the next 20 to 40 years” and the labor market is not adapting. He cited the country’s labor participation rate that rivals El Salvador’s and Costa Rica’s and also said interstate migration rates are at “multi-decade lows.”

“And the previous industrial revolution included mass riots that killed dozens of americans and caused billions of dollars worth of damage,” Yang said. “If you expect this one to be two to three times more impactful than that one, and that one required massive social responses [Labor Day, universal high school], then you would expect the same thing for this one, particularly because the data show that the degradation is already ripping through communities around the country and there has not been any real adjustment on the part of the labor market.”

Yang, who decided to run for president when he realized nobody in the political arena was talking about the fourth industrial revolution and the Americans who will be displaced by automation, made similar remarks this week during an interview with the Washington Post.

“If you have 3 1/2 million truck drivers in this country, which you do have, and only 13 percent of them are unionized, and you start to decimate their jobs in significant numbers, expecting all of them just to take that well seems to be inconsistent with our own history,” Yang said. “The first industrial revolution of the turn of the century gave us mass riots that killed dozens of Americans and caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage. That’s why we have Labor Day today. We inaugurated Labor Day because of those riots.”

Yang added that the country “instituted universal high school in 1911 in part to try and help the population adjust” and emphasized that “this industrial revolution is projected to be two to three times faster and more dramatic than that one.”

“So even based on our own history, you would expect massive social convulsions, including potentially violence,” he continued. “I wish I had better news to report, but this is just our history.”

Yang has been arguing on the stump that his signature policy proposal—the freedom dividend—will be “capitalism that doesn’t start at zero” and give Americans an economic floor to help them better deal with the fourth industrial revolution.