Andrew Yang’s Troubling Tucker Carlson Interview

The Democratic presidential candidate fed into Tucker’s MAGA narrative

Last Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang joined Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight for a 5-minute interview. Consistent with his book and platform, Yang warned of a coming wave of job losses due to automation, citing the fall in Midwest manufacturing employment and the 3.5 million truck drivers at risk of replacement by autonomous vehicle technology.

Yang normally uses this premise to motivate his policy prescriptions, especially the Freedom Dividend — a universal basic income funded by a value-added tax — central to his campaign. I support (and have written on) universal basic income, so I appreciate him bringing that issue into the national discourse. But his interview with Carlson showed the dangers of the tenuously-grounded populist frame he’s associating with that policy.

A recurring misleading claim on labor force participation rate

Carlson introduced Yang by warning of the dangers of automation and technology. After describing self-driving trucks, to back up his assertion that technology is already displacing workers, he said:

Labor force participation rate in the United States is 63.2 percent, the same level as Ecuador and Costa Rica.

This echoes his statements on Twitter and the Joe Rogan Experience, in which he…