Andrew Yang (楊安澤)
Andrew Yang (楊安澤 Yang An-tse) was born on January 13, 1975 to Taiwanese immigrant parents living in Schenectady, New York. He graduated from Brown University in 1996 with a dual bachelor’s degree in economics and political science. He then earned his J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1999. From 1999 to 2000 he was an attorney for Davis Polk & Wardwell. In 2000, he co-founded Stargiving, a website designed for celebrity-affiliated philanthropy. Yang later began working at a small test preparation company called Manhattan Prep, serving as CEO from 2006 until his resignation in 2012. In 2011, he founded Venture for America (VFA), a nonprofit fellowship program designed to create economic opportunities by helping young entrepreneurs gain necessary skills and resources to put more jobs on the market.
In 2012, Yang was recognized by the Obama administration as a “Champion of Change.” In 2015, he was named a “Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship.” Yang has published two books: Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America (2014) and The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future (2018).
Announcing his bid for the 2020 Presidential Election in 2017, Yang became the first Taiwanese American to run for President of the United States. His campaign slogans included “Humanity First,” “Make America Think Harder (MATH),” and “Not Left, Not Right, Forward.” Yang’s campaign began to gain a larger following in February 2019, and by March qualified for the first round of Democratic primary debates. He continued to meet the requirements for the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, and eighth debates as well. Throughout his campaign, Yang suffered from being excluded from media coverage, and in August 2019, his supporters used the hashtag #YangMediaBlackout to call attention to the disproportionate coverage of his campaign.
Though Yang ended his campaign on February 11, 2020, he was still optimistic, saying to his supporters, “while we did not win this election, we are just getting started.” In March of 2020, Yang announced his involvement with a non-profit organization called Humanity Forward that seeks to actualize the core values of his 2020 campaign, such as universal basic income, human-centered capitalism, and data as a property right. In 2019, T.A. Archives named Andrew Yang an Outstanding Taiwanese American.
References:
Biography: http://taiwaneseamericanhistory.org/blog/whoscho2058/
Yang 2020 Campaign Site: https://www.yang2020.com/meet-andrew/
Andrew Yang Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yang
