Andrew Yang

Andrew Yang

Andrew M. Yang was born in Schenectady, New York, and is the son of immigrants from Taiwan. He was part of the elite Phillips Exeter Academy debate team and competed at the world championships in London in 1992. He attended Brown University and then Columbia Law School. In 2011, Yang founded Venture for America, a nonprofit organization focused on creating jobs in cities struggling to recover from the Great Recession. In 2017, Yang filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for President of the United States in the 2020 election. Yang suspended his campaign on February 11, 2020, shortly after the New Hampshire primary, pledging that he and his movement are ‘just getting started’

About Andrew Yang in brief

Summary Andrew YangAndrew M. Yang is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist and former presidential candidate. Originally a corporate lawyer, Yang began working in startups and early stage growth companies as a founder or executive from 2000 to 2009. In 2011, Yang founded Venture for America, a nonprofit organization focused on creating jobs in cities struggling to recover from the Great Recession. In 2017, Yang filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for President of the United States in the 2020 election. Yang suspended his campaign on February 11, 2020, shortly after the New Hampshire primary, pledging that he and his movement are ‘just getting started’ Yang was born in Schenectady, New York, and is the son of immigrants from Taiwan. He attended Brown University and then Columbia Law School. Yang was part of the elite Phillips Exeter Academy debate team and competed at the world championships in London in 1992. He graduated from Davis Polk & Wardwell Law School in New York City in 1999, earning a Doctoris Doctoris in Jurisprudence. He is currently a political commentator for CNN and co-founder of Humanity Forward, a non-profit dedicated to promoting the ideas he campaigned on during his run. Yang’s signature policy was the \”Freedom Dividend,\” a universal basic income of USD 1,000 a month to every American adult as a response to job displacement by automation. He has been credited with elevating discussions on UBI, automation, and autism to the national level, as well as for engaging Asian Americans in presidential politics. Yang has an older brother, Lawrence, who is a psychology professor at New York University.

His father, uncle, and cousin also became professors. Yang’s father graduated with a PhD in physics and worked in the research labs of IBM and General Electric, generating over fifty patents in his career. He was one of the few children of East-Asian descent in his hometown, and he later described being bullied and called racial slurs by classmates while attending public school. When Yang was 12 years old, he scored a 1220 out of 1600 on the SAT, qualifying him to attend the Center for Talented Youth. He later attended Johns Hopkins University, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire, where he attended for the next five summers. Yang later attended Johns Hopkins Academy and competed in the national debate team in 1992 and 1993. He then attended Columbia University, and graduated in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science, and then in 1999 with a Master of Laws in law. He currently works as a corporate attorney at Davis Polk and Wardwell. He left VFA in 2017 to focus on his presidential campaign. In 2018, he authored The War on Normal People, which outlines several of his campaign’s central ideas. His supporters, informally known as the \”Yang Gang\”, included several high-profile celebrity endorsements and were noted for their ideological and political diversity. Yang received significant popularity online, with The New York Times calling him ‘The Internet’s Favorite Candidate’ Yang’s campaign was noted for its happy-go-lucky and ‘tech-friendly’ nature.