Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. Hope your new year is off to a good start. Hope you haven't

broken all your resolutions yet. Couple quick announcements before we start today's

episode. First, next week we will be resuming our Hidden Side of Sports series with a look

at the mental side of sports. But also, in a couple of months, we will be participating in the

famous MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which means we will have access to some of the

sharpest sports analysts and coaches and owners and athletes in the world. So we want your questions

for them. Send us the sports questions you've always wanted to answer. Do any aspect of any sport,

whatsoever? The weirder, the question, the better. Our email is radioatfreconomics.com.

Thanks, and now on to today's episode.

Andrew Yang is not famous, not yet at least, maybe he will be someday. But let me tell you his story.

He's 44 years old. He was born in Schenectady, New York, a city long dominated by general electric,

the sort of company that had long dominated the American economy. But which, as you likely know,

doesn't anymore. Yang's parents had both immigrated from Taiwan and Metin grad school. His mother

became a systems administrator, and his father did research at IBM. He got his name on 69 patents.

Their son Andrew studied economics and political science at Brown. He got a law degree at Columbia,

and ultimately became a successful entrepreneur with a focus on widespread job creation. In the

American Dream sweepstakes, Andrew Yang was a pretty big winner. But along the way, he came to see

that for every winner, there were thousands upon thousands of losers. The economist Joseph

Schumpeter famously described capitalism as an act of creative destruction with new ideas and

technologies replacing the old, with nimble startup firms replacing outmoded legacy firms,

all in service of a blanket rise in prosperity. The notion of creative destruction has for decades

been part of the economic orthodoxy, and it's undeniable that global prosperity has risen, not just

...