Author
When Marianne Wanamaker stepped in to instruct a class on public leadership at the University of Tennessee’s Baker School, she had two goals: Teach the next generation of public servants the history of recent leadership crises and emphasize the trade-offs that leaders faced in real time.
“The idea here was, hey, these kids are 22 years old. They’re going to go out and be ready to work at a public employer, and there are a whole series of stories that their bosses know that they don’t know, at least not in the same way that their bosses know them,” Wanamaker said. “If you try to look at all of what is happening right now without that context, how would you ever make sense of it?”
To study each of those stories—Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, COVID, the financial crisis—the class took the perspective of the people making the choices. “We framed it as, What are the trade-offs that someone in that position is facing?” Wanamaker said. “And therefore, why might someone think this was the right answer, even if in retrospect, we understand that it wasn’t? It’s about understanding that every time you make a decision in public life, you’re choosing one value over another one.”
The class reflected themes that have animated Wanamaker’s career: a love of history, a commitment to public service, and a belief that listening to others is essential for citizens and leaders alike. Wanamaker was drawn to economics because of her fascination with people’s stories. “I want to know where you started, what caused you to take the education path that you took, how did you end up where you are?”
Wanamaker’s own journey started in Tennessee, where she grew up hearing stories from great-aunts and great-uncles who had, like millions of other Americans, followed the railways to points north and west before returning home. She later published several papers on the Great Migration. After earning tenure as a professor of economics at the University of Tennessee and serving on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, she became executive director of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, leading its transformation into Tennessee’s first school of public policy that graduates students with master’s and bachelor’s degrees. The Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs is now in its fourth year of operations.
“This place had zero students three years ago, and we’re going to have 600 in the fall,” Wanamaker said. “The way you get to changing the nature of the public service workforce is you just graduate students, and in 10 years you will be able to see your impact.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What were the big questions that inspired you to specialize as an economic historian?
I started my career being really interested in choices people made about how many children to have. I studied all of that in a historical context. One of the big mysteries of economic history is the demographic transition. Why was it that we went from having basically as many babies as we could to a very, very small subset of that number? Why did it happen in different places at different times for different demographic groups in the U.S.?
I think what’s interesting about it is it’s only partially economic. It’s also cultural—it’s about what are the elites doing and how do people model that or follow that. And so that kind of transmission of ideas alongside the economic causes—that’s what Joel Mokyr won the Nobel prize for, was trying to understand the dissemination of ideas and how that intersects with the dissemination of economic change itself. Fertility is no different.
The saying goes that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. Do you look around you and feel like we are making some of the same mistakes?
Yesterday, I was thinking about how when you study demographic history, you start with Malthus and the idea that the amount of life-sustaining material in the environment is the thing that determines the birth rate.
And so in years where there’s more food, there are more babies. I mean, it’s true for deer and it’s true for humans. And this is the thing you’re trying to refute in economic theories about demography, that it’s not just about how much food there is. But if you think about what is happening right now, why are people not having babies? One of the reasons people aren’t having babies is it’s super expensive to get a house. It’s super expensive to get day care. All the pieces are really expensive, and food is back on the menu of things that are in scarcity.
So I’ve been thinking the last 24 hours, Malthus is back. And if you want a different demographic outcome, you can’t have everything be expensive and you really can’t have housing be expensive. People just aren’t going to have babies in that environment.
So anyway, that’s my hot take on an old idea.
What are some of the important economic consequences of the decline in fertility that you see as deserving more of our attention?
The one that is really interesting to me is the public finance implications. So here’s an example. In Southern states, our fertility rates are pretty low. Our death rates are pretty high.
But what we do have in the South are some higher education institutions that we’re super attached to. This is not just in the South, but thinking about the state that I’m in and the states that border us, there are a lot of flagship universities. Mississippi has two, Alabama has two, South Carolina has two. And you start thinking about a decline in population and how do you support those schools? And then you think about the regional state schools. The regional schools are really important from an economic development perspective, yet there’s no way that all of those higher ed institutions can maintain the scale that they have been at. And so it’s going to require some sort of interesting public finance outcome, which almost certainly means we have less money for other stuff.
Another place we may see a consequence of the demographic transition is the trajectory of U.S. economic growth. What do you see as the drivers of growth in the American economy right now?
Well, I’ve certainly changed my perspective on this as the country has sort of changed its strategy. Not meaning that we actually have been cognizant of our changing strategy, but quietly behind the scenes, we have changed our strategy as a country from “We are going to lead on labor force” to “We’re going to lead on technology.”
I think it would be healthy for all of us to take a step back and acknowledge this quiet choice that we’ve made. If I were in charge, task number one is write down the equation: Economic growth equals the sum of the growth in workforce plus the growth in labor productivity. That’s it. And then you can say, because we have decided to really restrict immigration and workforce, that means that in order for this economy to keep growing, the technology that drives labor productivity has to shine.
We didn’t have to make this choice, but it’s a choice that we made. I think most Americans don’t realize that there was a fork in the road and we took one path—the low immigration path—and not the other. And I think the whole conversation is healthier once you can do that.
In 2024, 84 percent of population growth in this country was due to immigration. That tends to get people’s attention. They’re like, wait, what?
If you don’t have more people, the only other way to grow is through innovation. And I think you see that playing out right now with the intense focus on technology—which the government didn’t lead. This is really a private sector process.
People don’t trust technology all the time, they don’t trust data centers, they don’t trust AI. And yet in the absence of population growth, these things are the key to economic growth. There’s no way around it. And so I think the policy world is trying to figure out how to manage that. We put all of our eggs in the technology and innovation basket, and the American people are really skeptical about the technology and innovation basket. And so what do we do next?
Let me put that question back to you: What do we do next? How should leaders be communicating about technology in order to build trust and foster economic growth?
On the technology side, I think a sort of silver lining in all of this is that no one trusts technology. People on the left, people on the right, people in the middle. So it’s actually a very nonpolarizing topic, and it’s hard to name a lot of nonpolarizing topics right now. Now, it’s polarizing in the sense that you have pro-technology and anti-technology people, but they don’t cleanly line up with political parties.
I’ll also say that when it comes to data centers in particular, their location, the side effects, the environment, the tax, the effects on the energy system, these are hyper-local questions. And it’s good for us as Americans to have hyper-local questions that get sorted out in our city councils and our county commissions and don’t get resolved in Washington. Immigration isn’t a thing that you could sort out in the city council in Knoxville, but data centers are.
As the drivers of economic growth shift, how do you see the opportunity for economic mobility for the younger generation?
I think there are lots of reasons to be optimistic. We’re in a period of very disruptive change. Disruption can reset what otherwise would be a default to higher levels of inequality and less mobility.
It doesn’t have to turn out that way, but it could. The optimistic side of me sees a leveling of the playing field in the sense that there are things that AI can do where previously, it would’ve taken a particular path to develop that skill and that particular path might have been more accessible to higher socioeconomic status individuals. I do think this technology has a chance to democratize a lot of things.
One thing I think that’s concerning when you look at the early data on AI is that men are way more likely to adopt AI in their daily life than women. And they’re also more likely to build the skillset. So I think that’s something we have to watch. Will that change over time or is that destined to be a gender gap that we’re going to live with forever? I would view that to be a very negative thing if that’s the way that that played out.
On the flip side, what do you see as some of the obstacles to inclusion in the economy today?
What I see is we still have a lot of attention in this country on higher education. I work in higher education and it’s great to have attention on your industry, but from my perspective, our attention on higher education is way out of line with our attention on what happens before kids get to school.
In my own state, we spend a ton of resources and a ton of time thinking about what happens as soon as a kid turns 18 and graduates from high school. What community college are they going to? What training program are they in? What’s their workforce pathway?
How much time do we spend thinking about what happened to the kid the year before they show up in the kindergarten room? Zero. And yet I think you could argue that what happens to them when they’re 4 is just as important as what happens to them when they’re 19, or certainly it’s not zero and 100 percent. It’s way harder to catch up than to never allow the gap to emerge.
I’ll also say that I find it a little bit puzzling that when we talk about pre-K, we talk about it as though it’s just solving this human capital problem. But pre-K also solves day care, which is on people’s top-five list of affordability problems in this country.
There have been a lot of headlines about the tough economic environment that new college graduates are facing. What is your message to the undergraduates at the Baker School in light of these anxieties?
I think it’s actually a two-part issue. One is the headlines about the labor market that they’re walking into. Two is how many times this generation has been told that they are in deficit as a generation.
So what I tell them is, Look, I can’t do anything about housing prices. I can’t change that. I can tell you that, Are unemployment rates for college-age kids coming out of college higher than they have been? Yes. Are they high? No. You still have a 95 percent chance of employment. So first of all, let’s make sure we understand what the numbers actually say.
And then the other thing that I spend a lot of time talking to them about is this deficit framing of their generation, that there’s something wrong with them. And I remind them that we have a country that is desperate for an ability to talk across difference, to find inclusion, to solve problems together. And those are all the characteristics that this generation does have.
They’re really good problem solvers. They’re very interested in inclusion. I think it’s because of COVID. The group that I am with every single day, they love a good gathering where Republicans and Democrats are in the same room. They love that.
Then on the economic side of the equation, they are in a position to take advantage of the technological change in a way that those of us who are 20 years their senior cannot. Can I rewrite an email with AI? Sure. Can it be part of what I offer the labor market? Absolutely not. Can it be that for them? Yes. And there’s increasing evidence that employers are looking for that.
This isn’t the first time a younger generation has been told by their elders that they don’t have what it takes. Do you think there’s something different about the message that young folks today are hearing?
I mean, I don’t think it’s different from what they were told, but I think the context is wildly different. At the moment people don’t believe in the capacity of the country to do the things that we have to do to succeed. And so it’s not that I think the country is telling this generation that it’s their fault, but they certainly aren’t recognizing that they’re the answer.
Fundamentally what we’re not able to do as a country anymore is communicate. And what is the younger generation good at? They do know how to communicate. They may not communicate the way we do, but I enjoy watching high schoolers, college-aged kids on Instagram or on LinkedIn. When someone posts something that they’ve done, they will get 400 messages of how proud their classmates are of them. That would not have happened when I was that age even if Instagram was available. Just the level of support and collaboration in life is different for this group in a way that I think is super helpful.
How does the Baker School prepare students to be effective public problem solvers and meet the challenges at the moment?
Well, we start with their first class when they come to the Baker School, which is an introduction to citizenship. The idea is to get them prepared to think about their role as citizens as well as the role of government. What is it supposed to be doing? What is our role in it? And then they take an introduction to public policy, which is how do we get stuff done? What are we trying to accomplish? And an important part of how you get stuff done and how you become a public problem solver is that you listen to other perspectives.
I think the beauty of what we’ve built at UT at the Baker School is that we have very intentionally recruited students from all over the political spectrum. So you’re in class from the beginning with people who by definition you’re not going to agree with about everything. And then our faculty are in the business of helping people see, okay, you don’t agree with this person about this, but you still have to solve the problem. How might you get to a solution that everyone can live with? That used to be called compromise. It’s a dirty word these days, so we don’t use it. But public problem-solving is just as good a phrase.
The magazine of the opportunity & Inclusive Growth institute
But it starts with recognizing the strengths of this generation. That tension of, “Hey, we both want to solve this problem, but we don’t see eye to eye on it”—they enjoy living in that tension.
Tennessee recently passed a law to improve civic education at the K-12 level. What are the essential components of civics learning and how does civic knowledge strengthen our communities and our country?
I think the core of civic knowledge is understanding that the system was built for disagreement. If you understand that, then everything else is possible. If you don’t understand that, then it’s not possible. And the way you understand that is to study the founding. Understanding the diversity of views that were in the room, the way that the actual outcome, the U.S. Constitution, is itself a compromise and it reflects the disagreement of those founders. If those great humans can disagree and still find common ground, that is the calling for all of us.
Winning is not the calling. The compromise is the calling.
This article is featured in the Fall 2026 issue of For All, the magazine of the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute
Lisa Camner McKay is a senior writer with the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute at the Minneapolis Fed. In this role, she creates content for diverse audiences in support of the Institute’s policy and research work.
