It sounds like Noah Smith isn't actually disagreeing with Yang's solution (on the contrary), only his purported reason for it. From the article: "Instead of so

It sounds like Noah Smith isn't actually disagreeing with Yang's solution (on the contrary), only his purported reason for it. From the article: "Instead of sounding the alarm about robots, proponents of a basic income should use arguments that aren’t dependent on the threat of automation -- and there are many good ones." On the macro level, automation's effects are uneven. At present, the gains from automation are likely incremental. I suspect the losses from automation however might be deeply felt by a segment of the population that most of us rarely interact with. An economist recently put it like this: "the gains are diffuse, the losses are concentrated".