Interview with Anne Marie Slaughter

Zachary Karabell (0:01)

What could go right in a world where we are so focused on what could go wrong? I'm Zachary Karabell. Speaking with me today is Anne Marie Slaughter, who is the President and CEO of New America. In full disclosure, I am also on the Board of New America. She is the former Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department, where she was for a few years when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. She was Dean of the Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She's a Professor at Princeton. She has written a number of books including A New World Order, The Idea That Is America, Keeping Faith With Our Values in a dangerous World, and Unfinished business, Women, Men, Work, and Family. She is also a frequent commentator. Her article for The Atlantic, which was the foundation for unfinished business about women and work and maybe not being able to have it all, was one of the most read articles ever on the Atlantic's website. She is someone who spans both domestic policy and foreign policy, and her most recent book which sort of speaks to both of those is The Chessboard and the Web, Strategies of Connection in a Networked World. So I'm happy today to speak with Anne Marie Slaughter.

So Anne Marie, as you know, one of the things I'm trying to focus on in these conversations with stimulating informed, insightful, passionate, compelling people like you is the under-examined question of, we're all acutely aware of the problems that beset us, but what are the things that might turn out better than we think? What might go right? I know you've been somewhat in between the academic work you've done and the work in government, and now, of course, at New America, you're focusing constantly on the problem-solving and on the issue addressing from the perspective of, we can and should try to do something to make a better world rather than resigning ourselves to, it's all going to hell in a handbasket. So I know that's a broad beginning of a conversation, but given you think about it all the time.

Anne Marie Slaughter (2:13)

Well, I think the place to start is the American history around reinvention and renewal. I wrote a book in 2007 called The Idea That Is America, and one of the things that I wrote about was the ways in which we had our founding, we reinvented ourselves obviously after the Civil War as a more equal, although hardly equal country, and at least formally more equal than again with the Great Depression, and some people would say again in the 1980s with the Reagan Revolution. But that means I have a lens of seeing change and even deeply frightening and negative change from the perspective of the moment in a longer context of reinvention and renewal. And we're in the early phases of the digital revolution, which will cause as much upheaval as the industrial revolution did. But what I see there is a huge set of challenges caused by technology that's changing how we work, and thus how we live, and how our families interact and where we live. So lots and lots of disruption. But I see things, for instance, like the revolution in care and what I see as a coming growth of good care jobs. That's just one and we can talk further about it. I see things like a craft revolution. I'm really struck by the master breweries, the craft breweries everywhere. That is something many people have commented on. But I see that as the first wave of the return of the guilds. So you have master masons, master builders, master bakers, a return to craft and apprenticeship more on a local level. And then just thinking about the circular economy and all the things that need to be torn down, like strip malls everywhere. And what are they going to then become? And how are we going to reuse all of those materials? So just talking about, even thinking about jobs, I see lots and lots of challenges, but I definitely see a positive renewal.

Zachary Karabell (4:48)

So on the job front, right, the flavor of the month in sort of wonky policy, the other circles is the McKinsey Global Institute study a few months ago that talked about what percentage of current employment is at risk by being replaced by technology, by robotics, by artificial intelligence. And those figures range from 25% to up to 50, depending on the job and the place, some much more vulnerable, some much less vulnerable. And it's easy to respond to that with a, oh my god, we have enough problems currently with underemployment and people disengage or disenchanted with their prospects for work. And then this comes along, which would suggest that the disruptive effects of technology is in the early innings and not the later stages. How do you respond to that? I mean, what are we supposed to do with that?