This week’s Business of Giving features Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America. Slaughter, who served as the director of Policy Planning during the Obama administration, says the public should be included more in policy solutions that affect them directly, especially on issues like food stamps, paid leave, and the environment.
“Often, I think we can solve problems by finding the things that are working and bring them together,” she says.
Listen to the podcast, which is hosted by Denver Frederick, or read the transcript below.
Denver: My next guest has worn many, many hats – all with remarkable skill – and has thought deeply about how women and men need to integrate their professional lives with that of their family life. She has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Princeton; held the key post in the State Department, working for Secretary Clinton; and currently is the CEO of New America. But she’s perhaps best known by the general public for an article she wrote in The Atlantic titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which was the most read article in the history of the magazine. She is Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter. Good evening, Anna-Marie, and welcome to The Business of Giving!
Anne-Marie: What a pleasure to be here!
Denver: There’s so many places we could begin, but let’s start with your current position as the CEO of New America, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Tell us about the organization and its mission, which was updated in 2017.
Anne-Marie: It was. Well, New America is a think tank. We also think of it as an action tank because we’re blending thought and action. Our mission is very grand. Our mission is renewing America by holding the country to its highest ideals in an age of rapid technological and social change, and all three of those things are important. We really believe that New America is growing out of old America…that you cannot move forward by destroying the past; you’ve got to bring at least part of the past with you. We believe in renewing our commitment to our highest ideals like a couple would renew their vows; we need to do that as a country on a regular basis. And critically, we focus on the kinds of challenges and opportunities that rapid technological change is bringing, which we see every day. But not just technological change, social change. America is changing dramatically, demographically and socially. So that’s this broad, broad mission, and then within that, we focus on a number of more specific areas. But it is really an organization that I think of as an “engine of renewal” at a time when the United States really needs new ideas, new solutions, and a way of moving forward, as I said, that brings as many people as possible along.
Denver: That’s so interesting because so many think tanks are pretty staid and are pretty traditional, and I was even impressed that you did update your mission statement in 2017, which means you’re renewing yourself at the same time.
Anne-Marie: Yes. We are. Absolutely.
Denver: Well, I think listeners will get a better idea of exactly what you do by talking about a few of the initiatives that you and your team are in. One of them is embracing true pluralism in this country through ranked-choice voting. Tell us what that is and its possible benefits.
Anne-Marie: Honestly, if you ask me: What is the one thing you would do to change this country if you had only one thing? I would change our electoral system from voting for one candidate to ranking a couple of candidates. That’s what ranked-choice voting is. So, if in the presidential election, you had three or four candidates, you could say the Democrat is first; an independent is second, and the Republican is third. Maine already does this across the state, and 15 cities do this. It’s not rocket science, and it does not require a constitutional amendment. But here’s what’s so important about it: In the first place, it makes people move to the center, not the extremes, because I want to be your first-choice candidate, but I want to be somebody else’s second-choice candidate. And that means I can’t just play to my base. I’ve got to make sure that the people who don’t want me first might want me second because the way it works is: it’s whoever gets the most first choice-, the most second choice-, the most third-choice votes. The other thing is, it would allow us to become a multi-party democracy. I don’t believe that America can survive this century with two parties that are completely polarized. And honestly, if you look right now in our politics, there are probably a number of Republicans who don’t like President Trump. There are probably a number of Democrats who think that the left of the Democratic Party is too far left, but they’re not going to move to the other party. That’s too far. If there were a more centrist party, they probably would. There’s nothing to stop us from having three or four parties. That would give us a wider range of choice. It would give much more fluidity. If I wanted to start a party, I could start a party. You don’t want to be a country with 10 parties, but it is a way of giving people more choice. I would just say: 100 years ago, we changed our political system from having senators selected by the upper house of state legislatures, to direct elections. That took a constitutional amendment. This is much easier, and every state can do it on its own. So, multi-party democracy.
Denver: You sold me in about a minute and a half. It just gets us away from something that I never heard growing up, and that was: energize your base, and it’s: get that vote out. And It’s almost like they’ve given up on the middle – almost, not entirely – but the way you win these elections is: energize your base, and that is by throwing them more and more red meat.
Anne-Marie: Exactly.
Denver: Iowa has that, I believe, in their caucus, doesn’t it? In terms of a…
Anne-Marie: They do have some ranked-choice voting. Absolutely. And as I’ve said, Maine has adopted it for all its elections.
Denver: That’s incredible. Higher education is a biggie for New America, and you’ve championed ending the so-called “college blackout,” and making higher education outcomes more transparent. Now, what’s the issue here?
Anne-Marie: We want to reinvent higher education, and I say that as somebody who spent a lot of my life in higher education. One of the things we really want is for students to be able to really see college outcomes. People can see the ranking of a university. They can see the price… although even costs are not as transparent as they should be. What they can’t see is: How many people graduated? How many of those people got a job? Particularly for kids who are taking on a lot of college debt – a lot of them take on that debt and then don’t graduate, which means they’re in the worst of all worlds. They ought to be able to choose based on: What’s the best education that is not just going to give me a critical mental training, but help launch me on a career? Colleges fight this because they say, “We’re not training grounds.” But, look, it’s not fair to ask people to pay all that money without seeing where graduates end up. Frankly, it would incentivize colleges to pay more attention to where their students go afterwards.
Denver: What kind of movement are we seeing in that?
Anne-Marie: Not enough. Here, universities fight very hard. They do have a point that you want to protect the privacy of individual students, but we’re talking about aggregate data. There is no reason you can’t do this, but you can imagine that’s a ground on which many colleges and universities don’t want to be measured. I think where we’ll see more progress is like community colleges. Particularly, if community colleges can offer four-year degrees, then you’d be able to say, “Hey, wait a minute. If I stay here, and I do follow this course of study, these graduates got these jobs.” We need to reconnect the educational system and the workforce.
Denver: Community colleges are so underappreciated, yet so important
Anne-Marie: They really are essential. They are community hubs, not just for more and more students and connecting to companies who need a workforce, but actually I think for more people who can teach. There are an awful lot of people who would love to be teaching but can’t break into the traditional academic sector.
Denver: To give an idea of the breadth of what you do, you have also been observing important trends in America’s covert drone program. Now, that’s a matter most citizens know very, very little about. What have you discovered?
Anne-Marie: So, we track all US drone strikes, and we have a number of ways of finding out about them. They’re ultimately openly reported in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Libya, in Somalia, in parts of Western Africa. We simply keep a database. We just say, “These are the facts.” It’s been very important. We’ve tracked civilian casualties as, again, from open sources. The result of that work was that we found the civilian casualties were considerably less than some advocacy groups were reporting, but considerably more than the Pentagon was acknowledging or the CIA was acknowledging. And that actually had made some policy change under the Obama administration. But mostly, this is the future of conflict. It is drones and droids and hackers.
Denver: We’re seeing it more and more and more.
Anne-Marie: Absolutely. We have to let the people know what’s happening. It seems like a cheap and easy way to wage conflict, but imagine if we had drones circling overhead in New York City and suddenly, a car just gets taken out. It can create long-lasting hatred and resentment of our country. And again, I understand there are costs and benefits, but the public needs to know. So that’s the kind of work we do that is more journalistic, but highly rigorous, and collects the data and makes it available to everybody.
Denver: Sometimes our regulations are behind our technology. I was reading a sports magazine the other day, and they don’t think there are going to be outdoor sporting events in 10 years because it’s just a matter of time before some drone attack is going to occur, and you might get dome stadiums and things of that sort, and they’re really concerned about this. You read this, and you say, “That’s a little far-fetched,” and then you say, “It’s not that far-fetched.” That happens once, and people are going to sit home in their living room and watch the game on TV.
Anne-Marie: Exactly. And anyone can operate a drone.
Denver: Anyone can. You recently co-authored a really interesting article, which appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled “The New Practice of Public Problem Solving.” Speak to some of the limitations of the way public problem solving has traditionally been done.
Anne-Marie: This is a subject about which I am really passionate because I was the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, and I’m a lifelong foreign policy person. So I have always believed that the way you solved a public problem was: you researched a question; you figured out an answer; you recommended a policy or a law; you advocated for it; you implemented it, and there you have it. I still believe policy is really important. If you want to get to scale, you still need government. But that process is too slow and too far from the people it affects. By the time you get a law passed, even if you can, you’re maybe five years from the research you did, and we’re in a society that is constantly changing.
Denver: I have overnight. In fact, I want same-day delivery from Amazon. You know what I mean?
Anne-Marie: Same day policy. Exactly. So, we’re sort of flipping that on its head, and we’re saying, “Let’s start with the implementation. And above all, let’s start with the people who are going to be affected.” So, if you were talking about food stamps, or you were talking about the earned income tax credit, or a paid leave, or any number of environmental policies or other policies, let’s start with the people and ask them what they need.
Denver: Not the problem per se, but the people.
Anne-Marie: Exactly…what they think the problem is, which is often not what you think it might be. Paid leave is a good example where we think people need time off – they do – but they also need transport to get to the daycare. There are things that we who are sitting in our think tanks or in universities don’t see. So, that’s the first pillar of the new practice: “Start with the people.”
Denver: And it really gets into beneficiary feedback, which we’ve never really done. I have worked in many nonprofit organizations. When we want to tackle a problem, we’ll talk to the staff; we’ll speak to the board; we’ll talk to the donors; we’ll bring in an expert, but we’ll never speak to the people we serve, and people who are closest to the problem are the ones who are closest to the answer.
Anne-Marie: Exactly right.
Denver: The second pillar is: “scout and experiment.” This has to do more with looking for solutions than creating them. Explain that.
Anne-Marie: Yes. So, this is again the perspective of someone who sits in a Washington think tank. Think tanks were invented 100 years ago, and they were a way of improving the quality of government. I’m all for the idea that instead of just patronage, you should have people thinking about what good policies are. But we tend to reinvent things or invent new things rather than going out to communities across the country and seeing what works. This is connected to human-centered design because you’ve got to be where the people are, and you then have to say, “Well, what is working already?” And often, I think we can solve problems by finding the things that are working and bring them together. Ultimately, you still need government to get to big scale, but I’ll give you an example: homelessness. So, Built for Zero is this wonderful organization that brings wraparound services to homelessness. They bring everybody together in a community.
Denver: They’re part of Community Solutions. Rosanne Haggerty.
Anne-Marie: Exactly. That’s really hands-on, human-centered stuff. They are figuring out what each homeless person needs; How do they provide those solutions? There’s no silver bullet there; there’s no tech app that makes everything wonderful, but it works. And if you find something that works like that, then start thinking about: How do you spread it? You may well have to adapt it because different communities are different, but that’s a very different experimental scouting approach than, again, writing a paper, issuing a report, and passing a law.
Denver: As I recall, that conversation I had with her, too, and getting back to point number one: They have the names of the people who are homeless. They’re just not a demographic – they’re Denver and Anne-Marie.
Anne-Marie: Exactly. That’s right. But they have really delivered results. They have reduced homelessness to zero in some communities.
Denver: Fantastic. The third is “data-enabled.” Now, what are the shortcomings of how we use data in the public sector now? What does this new approach do instead?
Anne-Marie: I really do think that in the future, people like me who grow up wanting to make the world a better place in various areas, we will be steering them toward data science as much as public policy school or law school or public health or anything else. That’s because you put your finger on it. It’s feedback loops. So, if you think about how a product is created – certainly, a software product but, frankly, any product – you create a prototype, you sell it or you give it to customers– beta testing– and then you see what works and what doesn’t, and then you constantly improve it. We don’t do that in the public sphere. We pass a law, or we implement it, and then we discover– even some of our very best laws, something like paid leave and the states that have it– only 30% of people take it up because it’s not delivered right, or because often very small details mean that the people it’s intended to reach, it doesn’t reach. So, data is that critical feedback loop of how many people are using this; then you find out why they’re not, then you tweak it, then you measure the success, and then you’re able to constantly improve.
Denver: One of my favorite lines – and I’ve used it before – but I think it comes from Silicon Valley, and that is: If you design a product and then you test it and people don’t laugh at you, you’ve waited too long.
Anne-Marie: I like that very much, but that’s exactly right. You’ve softened it. Exactly.
Denver: And the final critical element is to “bring innovation to scale,” and that is so much more difficult than I think most people appreciate. How can that best be achieved?
Anne-Marie: There’s no one way, but it is so hard, and we have to do that. I am very supportive of social enterprise and people who are trying to blend market forces with public purpose to try to reach new solutions, but individual organizations – very hard to get to scale. Very hard. This is not like the private sector where the more people you serve, the more money you make, so the more people you can serve. In the nonprofit sector, the more people you serve, the more it costs you with the more money you have to raise. This is a very different business model. So that means that, ultimately, you really do often have to work hand-in-hand with the government because only the government can get to scale. But I think there are also ways, again, of…if you think about homelessness, you think about Community Solutions, Built for Zero. But then you may go to another community that has a different organization that’s doing some of the same things but is adapted to their community. And you go to multiple communities, you can create a kind of flotilla of individual organizations that are all sailing in the same direction, that all have the same goals… You need those common metrics because you’ve got to have data to say, “No. We are collectively—”
Denver: One playbook that you have.
Anne-Marie: One playbook, one set of metrics. Frankly, you need to change the funding schemes because what happens is now those organizations would like to sail together, but each of them needs to stoke their own engine room. That means they need general operating support, and so they’re much more likely to compete because they want to say to funders, “Fund me. Don’t fund us.” But that is a way of getting to scale– pulling together lots of individual organizations. It requires work to actually manage that coalition, to keep it sailing in the same direction. It requires different funding. But I think it’s important for civil society not to say, “Well, there’s just one solution,” and certainly, not to just have it be government. Ultimately, we actually want the private sector, too. We want multiple organizations, and we want to have them sailing together.
Denver: When someone tells me there’s just one solution, I head for the hills.
Anne-Marie: Yes. Exactly.
Denver: Let me return to what I mentioned in the opening, and that was The Atlantic magazine article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which led to a book entitled “Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family.” What was going on in your life at the time when you wrote that article?
Anne-Marie: Well, I had a son who was having a very bumpy adolescence. That son is now 22, and I actually look back and realized by the standards of many parents, it wasn’t so unusual. But he was making bad choices. I was in Washington; I was in a dream job. I was hoping to stay and get promoted. I was commuting back and forth from Princeton to Washington, and I just realized for the first time in my life… which had been very lucky until then… I had to make a choice. There was no amount of leaning in, of ambition, of whatever else that was going to fix this. There were no more hours in the day and, frankly, I didn’t know that if I went home, things would be better. My husband was doing his level best, but I knew I had to try because when a child is 3, and they have a problem, you Band-Aid…you get help. When a child is 13, you can’t outsource that.
Denver: That’s a critical year. It really is.
Anne-Marie: So, I went home, and I wrote this article; and it wasn’t designed to say: Women can’t have it all; it was designed to say: we’ve got to make a lot of changes still. Because this idea that if you just try hard enough, you can make it…I’m as ambitious as anyone, and I’ve tried really hard. And if this happens in my life – my privileged, affluent, high-level career life – just think about all the women who have had to make choices between their family and their career. And we’re not supporting them; we’re not letting them get back in; we’re not harvesting their talents. So that was the point of the article. It was essentially, “Wow. I have just realized what I have been seeing all my life, and it’s changing my own perspective.” Many, many women – they still come up to me and talk about how it affected their lives – but many of them just said, “I sat and cried when I read it.”
Denver: I talked to my daughter last night and said you were going to be on. She said, “I read that article.” One of the things that I was really taken by was that when you went back to Princeton and told people it was because your tenure was going to expire, and you get a two-year absence – “Cool.” But when it was “to watch my son and work with my son” – “Really?” And they kind of looked down upon you almost. That must have really hurt.
Anne-Marie: Well, I thought it was outrageous, actually. And my book is about valuing care because what I realized was – exactly. As long as I had made my departure about career, people thought: “She’s a player. I get this.” And the minute that I said, “Well, no. Our son is having some issues, and I’m focused on it,” which really should be, in the scale of human values, higher than your career ambitions—
Denver: You would think so. On your deathbed, it probably will be.
Anne-Marie: I got, “Well, you’re not a player.” I could see people re-evaluating me. And that started me thinking about how it was that as a woman who wanted gender equality, we had privileged our fathers’ work – the work that brings in income– and downgraded our mothers’ work – the work of investing in others. I wouldn’t be here but for my mother’s work. My family is my foundation. And so a large part of my work since then, and New America’s work, has been to elevate the value of care, to say whether it’s a woman or a man, whoever’s caring and whoever is being cared for – children, parents (as I get older, I think about that, too), the disabled, family members – that work is as important to our society as the work that produces income, and we need to support it and value it as people.
Denver: And to your point, maybe even more value. It’s a social cohesion; it keeps us together. If we don’t have that unit working, it could be pretty bad.
Anne-Marie: Absolutely.
Denver: In your book, you also say that the next phase of the women’s movement is the men’s movement. Tell us what you mean about that. I should listen.
Anne-Marie: Well, part of it is simply logical. You can’t change the roles of one gender and not change the roles of the other. You’re just not going to get to equality that way. So, if you have a stylized world, which was never true because it was only true of pretty much fairly privileged white people, that women stayed home and men worked. There were lots of working women, women of color who always had to work. But still, if you change the roles of women so that they’re now in the workforce, then to get to equality, you’ve got to change the roles of men so they’re equally at home. And so that when I say the next phase is a men’s movement, we need to change what men do and what we value in men. And this is just as important– what women value in men, what men see in each other– to allow for men to be as much caregivers as they are breadwinners, because we’ve done that for women. Women…one of the reasons we want it all is we’ve become breadwinners, but we don’t want to give up the value of care, being needed by our children, the satisfactions of that part of our lives. It’s hard, but it’s satisfying. I actually think a lot of men want that, too. Men have written to me to say, “I would love to go home and be there for my kid’s baseball games, to be able to coach, to be able to be fully invested as a father, or as a son taking care of my own parents, and yet I am not only given no space to do that, but when I do, my masculinity is in question.” So, the men’s movement has to be for women and men to say, A man who says, ”I’m going home because I’m taking care of my kids” is not only a good feminist; he’s a good man. But he’s a man that we value and find attractive and think: “I’d rather have that man than the man who only wants to shoot to the top of the career ladder.”
Denver: I will say men can be pretty tough on each other when a guy does that. I mean, women may have something about the value, but with men, you have to have a thick skin if you’re going to do that because you’re going to get teased. You look at the men on the golf course with each other… it’s not pretty. It’s fun, but it’s not pretty.
Anne-Marie: No, it is not. And I tell other women that my husband, I think, is able to play the role he plays in our family because he’s really strong and secure. So that in fact, it’s the most secure men – a lot of guys who have been in the military, who have no issues about their masculinity, are often, particularly if they’re married to a woman who also deploys, they have no problem being the primary caregiver. But that’s again because they have the strength and security to withstand the ribbing of others. But women used to have to do that, too. The early women were called all sorts of names that I won’t repeat on air.
Denver: Thank you for that, by the way. Your husband’s also a good cook.
Anne-Marie: He’s a great cook.
Denver: So, let me ask you this. I know that if you want men to sort of assume an equitable amount of responsibility and accountability, women might have to give up being the lead dog, the lead parent in charge at home. Because if my wife were to ask me to do that, and I was tasked to do something, I’m going to do it my way. And I will be the first to admit, it may not be too pretty, at least at first. Are women willing to do that, you think? To give up that responsibility?
Anne-Marie: I think women have to examine our own sexism in the home as much as we’ve asked men to examine sexism in the office. And I often have conversations with women where a woman will start by saying, “I’m doing 75% of the work. He’s only doing 25%.” And I’ll say, “So let him plan a birthday party. Let him take it over completely.” And the response is always, “Oh my God. I couldn’t do that.” Well, why not? “Well, because they’d just eat pizza.” “Well, okay.”
Denver: If there is a birthday party.
Anne-Marie: So my first point is that the expression “to run a tight ship” comes from the Navy…that men actually managed for centuries to do the kind of housekeeping they need to do when they’re in all-male communities. The military is a good example: You had to sew a button; You had to shine your shoes; You had to cook. So, let’s not think they can’t do it; they’re just going to do it differently than we do. But I do that in the office. I do things differently in the office, and when a man says, “That’s not right,” I say “How come? Why am I not equal in how I want to do this?” So, mostly, I think, yes, men may do it differently. I always say that my husband thought it was more important for the boys to watch Marx Brothers movies all weekend than to do whatever chores I had in mind for them. Now, that they’re 20 and 22, they remember the Marx Brothers films. They’re like, “Who says that just because women have always done it this way, that’s the right way?”
Denver: That’s right. So, the lawn didn’t get cut when he was 17. He’s got a career in Hollywood.
Anne-Marie: They’re great poker players.
Denver: Anne-Marie, what policies would make the biggest difference for families in this country if they could be enacted?
Anne-Marie: So, there are two that would be game-changers. One really would be paid family leave. So, not just maternity, paternity, not even just childcare – paid family leave so that people really had a reservoir, a funded time to do what they need to do for their family members. And without that, lots of people end up leaving the workforce or going part-time… you just never know when somebody who’s close to you is going to have a problem. So paid family leave would be a huge difference. The other one, and we need elder care, too, but the starting point would be universal high-quality childcare. Ironically, or tragically, Richard Nixon almost signed a bill for universal childcare in 1971, passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support…so we have actually been there as a country. Just imagine if everyone knew – like the French have, like so many Europeans have – when you have a child, after a certain period of time, that child is going to be taken care of with the best research on child development, early education, and you’re going to be able to adapt your work life with that schedule. Some people may decide, “No, I want to be home a couple of days.” But that would be transformative and, frankly, it would be transformative for the quality of the care and education we give our children, which is essential to our future as a nation.
Denver: And in closing that inequality that exists. I can’t think of anything that would make a bigger difference than that.
Anne-Marie: Absolutely. It would make an enormous difference. Exactly.
Denver: Let me close with this, Anne-Marie. It’s about the upcoming presidential election. It’s not about what candidate you prefer or who you think is going to win. Rather, is there anything you would advise listeners to look for, to keep attuned to – maybe an issue, something that might be telling as to where this country is heading and what that outcome might be?
Anne-Marie: The first thing I would urge people to do is to look beyond 2024, to look beyond the endless 4-year cycle. I would ask people to start by looking at 2026. America will be 250 years old. I came of age during the bicentennial, when we were 200. The country has been transformed between 1976 and 2026. I would say to voters: Imagine what you want our country to be when we look back at 250. Imagine what you want for education, for the way we work, for the way we care for each other, for what our politics look like, for how we interact online. Think about what you want, and imagine looking back in 2026, and then look at what candidate is most likely to get us to that picture. So, drop whether your partisan politics as much as you can; drop the kind of crisis of the day, and think about: Where’s this country going and who’s going to get us there?… Because I think our future is very bright, but I think we’re in a very dark moment. I myself think about 2026, and I want to celebrate a wonderful country that is able to renew itself at regular intervals.
Denver: That’s so interesting. When you want to change your life, they always tell you to start visioning. And you’re asking the people of this country to start visioning where you want to go and then work backwards to how we’re going to get there. Well, Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America, I want to thank you so much for being here this evening. For people to learn more about New America, as well as your other work, or to give a financial contribution to support that work, what’s the best places for them to go?
Anne-Marie: Well, first of all, we welcome you all. Join us on a journey of renewal. So, our website, newamerica.org, has a lovely donate button, and we encourage you to donate. But we equally encourage you to find out about our work. I need ambassadors as much as financial supporters. I want people who share our vision, who tell others about a much stronger and better sense of where the country can go. And so, to do that, familiarize yourself with our work; sign up for our newsletters, and yes, by all means, give us a contribution.
Denver: Well, I spent hours on your website. It is unbelievably fascinating with the things you talked about. Thanks, Anne-Marie, it was a real pleasure to have you on the show.
Anne-Marie: Thank you so much. I so enjoyed the conversation.
Denver: I’ll be back with more The Business of Giving right after this.