So...as I've said before, while Yang coined the term, I've believed something similar to HCC for years before he ran for office. However, my own iteration of human centered capitalism or humanist capitalism differs a bit from Yang's version. I have previously outlined two major planks of it, but I do want to expand it to four now.
1) The economy doesn't exist for humans, humans exist for the economy
This is a no brainer for me. All of our social constructs exist to serve humans. If the economy is structured around us serving the economy, then we are merely slaves to an inhuman system. I admit, capitalism may have started out under those assumptions. Between the rich enclosing all of the land to turn everyone into wage slaves and then beating work ethic into them, I admit, our system started out as evil and coercive. Despite this, I still recognize that markets can serve humanity well. They create a lot of wealth, but also are relatively poor at distributing it. A human centered economy should serve to serve people, not the other way around. And as Yang would say, the unit of measurement in a human centered economy should be people and not money.
2) Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself
If the economy exists simply to serve our wants and needs, and not to enslave us, then work must exist as an end, not as a means. The point of work isn't to give people a purpose, or to give people a calling, or whatever feel good protestant work ethic nonsense people think it does. The purpose of a job is to serve humanity's wants and needs, NOT to simply give people a paycheck. The reason we link income with work is to positively incentivize work to serve those ends. Work is not good in and of itself.
3) To ensure people are free within a human centered economy, people need their basic needs met without being attached to work
The core flaw of capitalism which violates the first two principles above is the fact that we have reduced people to wage slaves, and coerce people to work. While positive incentives to work are necessary to incentivize people to do it, coercion should only be done if it is absolutely necessary, and given the massive wealth of the economy, I doubt it is truly necessary. As such, I advocate for freedom as the power to say no, not just to any job, but all jobs, as Karl Widerquist would say, and I would advocate for a basic income to be the centerpiece of a human centered economy. A basic income gives people back their freedom, both as a worker, as the money would liberate people from coercion to work, but also as a consumer, as they can spend the money as they will. The basic income should be sufficient to meet basic needs, and I would agree that further action should be taken to provide healthcare, education, and housing to people to maximize their freedom.
4) GDP should be balanced with leisure
Andrew Yang's version of human centered capitalism focused on replacing GDP with a battery of other metrics measuring health and well being in the economy. That's all well and good, and I agree, GDP needs to stop being the end all be all of the economy. But I have a more specific idea in mind. GDP should be actively balanced with leisure. The point of this extra productivity, and automating jobs, isn't just to produce more stuff, but to also allow us to work less and to further liberate us from work. We should celebrate when a factory closes down because it has been automated by machines. We should strive to minimize the amount of necessary labor done by humans in the long term so that we can all afford to work less. And as the economy grows, and stuff becomes automated, we should actively seek to reduce the work week, rather than working the same amount of hours to maximize economic output with no end goal in mind.
Again, if the economy exists for humans, and not humans for the economy, if work is a means to an end, and not an end in itself, then we should seek to free people from coercion to work under our system, and we should strive to minimize how much humans have to work. if they choose to work beyond that, that is fine, but we shouldnt coerce them. Let humans decide to do what they want to do. And let the free market decide from there.
I think this is a useful expansion of my original concept of human centered capitalism, and goes a lot further than yang's version in its implications. It explicitly weds the idea with a commitment to free people from wage slavery and actively reduce the impact work has on their lives. It would accomplish not just karl widerquist's views of indepentarianism and freedom as the power to say no, but also move us toward keynes' 15 hour work weeks and things like that. It is a natural evolution of my views.
I just wanted to share.
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