Dan Morrell: Sheryl WuDunn (MBA 1986) is the author of several books with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, most of which have focused on poverty in developing countries. But in the Pulitzer Prize-winning duo’s latest book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, they turn their lens on working class communities in the United States—communities that have been decimated by job loss and drug addiction.

In this episode of Skydeck, contributor April White speaks to WuDunn about what led to the fragile economic conditions of blue-collar America, what solutions are being developed to address those issues, and how the current COVID-19 crisis has revealed how much the country depends on its working class.

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April: I'd like to start where you do in the book—in and around Yamhill, Oregon. Yamhill is Nick's hometown, but you grew up in New York, so I'm wondering what your first impressions were.

Sheryl: Yamhill and New York couldn't be as far away in both spirit and mind as any two places in the country. When I first went to Yamhill, I just assumed that people there were a little bit more easygoing. I assumed that they had such a great life because they had many, many acres of land which, you know, when you’re born and raised in Manhattan, that's a real luxury. I came to know Yamhill over the years and discovered that while we had covered poverty overseas, there actually was a humanitarian crisis going on in our own backyard in Yamhill and we didn't even know it.

April: What brought that to your attention? Was there a particular moment that made you realize there was a story here that you really felt you needed to tell?

Sheryl: Over the years, I had met a lot of Nick's friends. As we got to know them—and they talked about their households, their family—we just realized that there was just this incredible dysfunction, that they were struggling so much beyond what I would ever have expected an American to have to be going through. And part of it had to do with drugs. Part of it had to do with not having enough money. But even just the spending decisions that they made when they had a little bit of money—it just reminded me so much of people that I had interviewed, for instance, in tiny poor villages in China that I was trying to write about poverty in China. And here it was in the US.

April: Was there something that you came to understand about the lives of your friends in Yamhill that you hadn't previously known? Did interviewing them and going through this process, both in Yamhill and around the country, illuminate something for you?

Sheryl: I think the most difficult part for us was that we hadn't realized how dysfunctional lives can be. People of all strata and all education levels, We get distressed, we get anxious, we get depressed, so to speak. But, the degree to which these people struggle is, is amazing.

For them just even being able to drive, to keep their car, to not lose their driver's license to the police because they haven't made their alimony payments. I mean, these are just such huge struggles for a lot of these people that it's, it's just heart-wrenching. These people just have so much going against them that it really is hard to tread above water, which is why we called the book Tightrope. These people are walking on the tightrope of life.

April: That quote from Drew Goff near the end of the book—“It's a tightrope I'm walking and sometimes it seems to be made a fishing line”—was very affecting. Can you tell me a little bit more about Drew?

Sheryl: Drew is a really interesting fellow. So we knew his father, Rick Goff. He was our age, and he worked on a family farm. But he had been involved in drugs. His son Drew, started using drugs when he was 12. And was in and out of jail. He never had a steady job, didn't finish high school as well. And then Drew had kids with some girlfriends of his, not married. And he happened to have this one kid, Ashtyn, who was born with drugs in his system. And so we thought, oh, no, this is going to be transmitted yet again to the next generation.

A year and a half, two years ago now, we ran into Drew. He was in a drug treatment program called Provoking Hope based in McMinnville, Oregon. Just very close to Yamhill. And we thought, wow, this is really interesting. He's trying to get through. He's trying to pick himself up. He went through the program. He got into some special housing, as a step back into normal day society. He was working at a hotel as a clerk there. And we thought, wow, this is great.

And so about three weeks ago, we saw him again. And we said, “Hi, Drew, how you doing? Hey, are you still at the hotel?” And he goes, “Oh, no, I'm not at the hotel anymore.” And oh, my goodness, our hopes were deflated. We thought that, oh, he's just not made it. And then he said, “But I'm a manager at a moving company. And I have ten people working for me. “

And we were just floored. We thought, oh, my goodness, he's gonna make it. And his son Ashtyn now is doing really well because Drew had taken parenting classes. He really seems to be pulling his act together. It's going to still be challenging. It's not going to be perfect. But at least he's on the right track. And that gives us so much hope, because we do think that across the country, Americans who are struggling can recover if they get help from places like Provoking Hope.

April: Sheryl, I want to step back and look at how we got here, how Yamhill got here, how Drew and his family got here. So you trace the origins of a lot of the challenges that you found in Yamhill and communities throughout the country like it to the 1970s. What changed a half century ago that put us on this trajectory?

Sheryl: Yes, a lot of the policy decisions we have taken that have led to this vast gap and this real stratified society—it's not the result of three years of the current administration. It really is something that has been building over years. Between World War II and the 1970s, we had boom-time years. We had a very inclusive capitalist economy where the pie was growing and everybody's piece of the pie was growing as well.

Then when it got to the 70s, obviously the economy wasn't doing so well and it probably did need a kick in the butt. There was a huge amount of deregulation. There was a shift of power from unions to corporations. So we did need some injection of new energy. The problem is that we have basically gone too far.

And on top of that, in the late 70s and early 80s, we made some terrible policy decisions in terms of what we did about drugs. We talk about Geneva Cooley in our book. And she's a woman who grew up in New York State and she got addicted to drugs for many years. And she happened to be going to Alabama to visit a friend. And she was carrying some drugs. She was carrying like a bag of heroin. And she got caught. Thrown in jail in Alabama prison. And she was sentenced to nine hundred and ninety nine years without parole. And meanwhile, you had these huge drug companies that look, they sell a lot of great drugs, but some of them happen to be selling opioids.

April: I'm curious what you see as the long-term consequences of those changes in the job world and in the business sector.

Sheryl: Well, I think the main changes over the decades has been that we have focused on shareholder capitalism. We need to move from shareholder capitalism and more to stakeholder capitalism. And yes, there are some CEOs leading the charge. Jamie Dimon (MBA 1982) at JP Morgan Chase is one case in point. He is someone who's trying to, you know, say we had to focus much more on our workers. And let's hope that's not just sort of PR. And that it really is something that's happening because we do need to change the dynamics for the working class.

April: One of the things you emphasized in the book is that these social problems we created are not intractable.

Sheryl: This is the age of innovation. There are people all over the country in universities and colleges who are actually doing research and conducting randomized control trials to determine what solutions work and what solutions don't work. And that's exciting.

So one of the programs that we talk about is Women in Recovery, WIR. It's in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And it's a brilliant program. It's very costly. But in comparison to the alternative, it actually saves a lot of money. So what WIR does—what WIR does—is that they look at women who are about to be sentenced to long prison terms and say if this woman really committed this crime due to an addiction, putting her in jail isn't going to solve the problem. Let's actually try and treat her addiction so that we can solve the problem for the long term and not just put her in jail for a while. She comes out, she you know, she she does it all again.

So they put these women into a 18 month program. They give them intense therapy. And then they also go through training classes. So they learn basics like business skills, how to write a resumé. They get apprenticeships with local companies. WIR has actually worked with a lot of employers to find ones that actually hire ex-convicts. And so after their apprenticeships almost all of them are placed in jobs. And after a year and a half or two, these women come out and they are productive citizens rather than people who have been in jail for two for two or five or six years and come out and do everything all over again.

April: When we think about these type of big structural social changes, we're often thinking about federal government action. Do you think there's also a place for the business community to lead this type of change?

Sheryl: Oh, absolutely. We think that everyone has to play a role. A lot of these solutions have to be community-run—whether it's corporations being involved, local companies, the local community, the local schools, the local health departments. They all have to make the decisions because they're on the ground and each community is different. But there has to be some federal support because a lot of these small communities, they are not going to be able to fund it by themselves.

April: Sheryl, you wrote this book in economic boom times. Unemployment rates were at 50-year lows and still many people were being left behind. Things have changed rapidly in the last couple of weeks. What does that tightrope you talk about look like now for people?

Sheryl: A lot of the working class already was on a tightrope and now they're actually being kicked off the tightrope and they are in mid-fall. And I think that it's really important for us to recognize even beforehand, when the Federal Reserve did surveys in the past few years, they discovered that 40 percent of Americans would have to borrow money if they had a $400 car repair bill. We have a lot of people who are on the edge. And if you look at the people who are now trying to keep this economy afloat, as many people work from home during the COVID-19 crisis. Guess who's delivering your food? Who is delivering the mail? Who is actually cooking the food? Who's actually putting those groceries on the shelves still and who's driving the truck to get that food so that it gets put on those grocery shelves? It's the working class. We depend upon them far more than we've ever thought before. And I hope that we do recognize how important they are. The system is still working. And it's thanks to the working class.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

Photo by Nicholas Kristof

Featured Alumni

Sheryl WuDunn

MBA 1986

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