Big ideas for an era of paralyzed politics

In the early 20th century, industrial tycoons like the Rockefellers and Carnegies amassed fortunes in railroads, steel or oil. Here, a view of Cornelius Vanderbilt's residence in New York in 1908.

Wealthy passengers aboard a ship near San Francisco, circa 1910s. In this era, the top earners accounted for roughly 18% of the national income.

People gathered across from the New York Stock Exchange on "Black Thursday," October 24, 1929. The stock market crash of 1929, fueled by excessive speculation on Wall Street, set off the Great Depression.

Thousands of unemployed people waited in line to register for federal relief jobs in New York in 1933. The unemployment rate rose to 25% that year.

On September 12, 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his staff met to find a solution to the economic crisis. FDR's New Deal policies tightened regulation of Wall Street, strengthened unions and set the top marginal tax rate for the rich at 90%.

A nurse takes care of children of migratory farm workers in Arvin, California, in 1937. The unemployment rate hovered in the teens. FDR created large-scale public work programs to provide jobs for the poor and middle class.

A plant in Toledo, Ohio, that made bombs. With the advent of World War II, demand for production of goods and services increased. By the mid-1940s, the unemployment rate dropped to less than 5%.

Labor unions benefited from FDR's policies and grew in power midcentury. Transit workers protested in New York on April 17, 1950. The Transport Workers Union threatened a strike if even one worker was punished for demonstrating.

Truck supervisor Bernard Levey with his family in front of their new home in 1950. The post-war period was a prosperous time for middle-class Americans.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, income inequality fell. Some economists call this period "The Great Compression." The median income at the time allowed a single earner to purchase a modest house and a car, support a wife and three children.

A worker at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento, California, in 1966. The feminist movement fought for equal pay for women, who were earning about 60 cents for every dollar earned by men.

In the 1970s, income inequality began to rise. The economy experienced wage and inflation problems, along with an oil crisis that caused a gasoline shortage. Here, a gas station in New York.

Post-1979 has been called the "Great Divergence." Some say that President Ronald Reagan's policy of supply-side economics, which reduced taxes for the rich, was a contributing factor.

Real estate tycoon Donald Trump with his Rolls Royce at his Mar-a-Largo property in Palm Beach, Florida.

The 138-meter (453-foot) yacht "Rising Sun" was purchased by Larry Ellison of Oracle, who has been one of the nation's highest-paid executives. From the 1990s on, CEO compensation greatly outpaced the average compensation of workers.

Home construction in Inverness, Illinois, in 2006. Risky mortgage lending was packaged by banks that sought to make big profits. The collapse of housing bubble instigated a credit crisis that triggered the global financial meltdown of 2007.

By 2007, the top 1% accounted for 24% of national income. Bernard Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme is one of largest financial frauds in history, made billions off hapless investors. Here, shoes that once belonged to Madoff.

Lehman Brothers, which collapsed in September 2008, filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Major financial institutions were bailed out by the government with a massive amount of taxpayer money.

John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, doled out more than $4 billion in bonuses to employees. Despite the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Wall Street handed out $18.4 billion in bonuses for 2008, which is the "sixth-largest haul on record."

A job fair in March 2009. Unemployment rose to 10% during the Great Recession.

In September 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement sprang up. The average income, adjusted for inflation, grew $59 from 1966 to 2011 for the bottom 90% of Americans.

Occupy Oakland protesters in California. In 2012, the income of the top 1% increased nearly 20% compared with a 1% increase for 99% of Americans.

A suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City costs $45,000 a night. Middle class Americans had a median household income of a little over $51,000 in 2013.

Today, the top 1% controls about 40% of national wealth. At a hearing in Washington D.C. about Wall Street and the financial crisis, protesters hold a placard depicting Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who once famously said, "I'm doing God's work."

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• Anne-Marie Slaughter: U.S. politics paralyzed, polarized and in "small-ball" mode


• She says that shouldn't prevent us from pushing ahead with big new ideas


• Economy needs to give Americans a "second chance" to thrive, she says


• Slaughter: Education, manufacturing, campaign finance all need rethinking

Editor's note: Anne-Marie Slaughter is president and CEO of New America, which is holding a conference in Washington on Thursday and Friday called "10 Big Ideas for a New America" with talks by Sen. John McCain, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. It will be live-streamed on CNN.com. Slaughter was director of policy planning in the U.S. State Department from 2009 to 2011. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 on the "audacity of hope," but "audacious" is hardly the first word that comes to mind in describing American politics these days.

Paralysis? Check.

Polarization? Check.

Small ball? Check.

In a column after a trip to Singapore in November, Thomas Friedman wrote: "(T)he country that showed the world how to pull together to put a man on the moon and defeat Nazism and Communism, today broadcasts a politics dominated by three phrases: 'You can't do that,' 'It's off the table' and 'The president didn't know.' "

In my view, at least, the further we fall the higher the potential for rising again. We cannot continue to muddle through, because muddling through now means falling further and further behind.

Our greatest strength as a nation has been our capacity for perpetual renewal. As Doris Kearns Goodwin shows in her splendid book "The Bully Pulpit," we faced similar challenges of corrupt government, excessive concentration of power and a denial of equal opportunity to the majority of our citizens at the end of the 19th century. The progressive movement, born initially out of the Republican Party but ultimately drawing supporters from both parties, rose to the occasion.

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That change was fueled by a vibrant press and an entire set of new ideas that accompanied new technologies. Big ideas about how to organize our government and ourselves, how to structure our economy, how to reform our educational system and our working conditions. We need a similar set of ideas today.

That's why the think tank and civic enterprise I lead, New America, is trying to shift the national conversation toward a set of big ideas as blueprints for change.

Two big ideas strike at the heart of who we are as a nation and what we offer our citizens.

Rachel Black, Reid Cramer and Aleta Sprague call on America to "restore the second-chance economy." The American dream has always been one not only of upward mobility, but of the ability to fall and rise again. Millions of Americans came to this country to reinvent themselves; in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they could escape the stigma of bankruptcy or even a criminal conviction by heading out to the frontier. Yet while "fail early and often" is a recipe for success in Silicon Valley, it is a death sentence, sometimes literally, for the majority of Americans. Credit histories and criminal records now follow citizens everywhere and forever, always accessible online.

We need to end institutional practices that currently double down on disadvantage, while at the same time helping our citizens build assets and provide social insurance that will cushion them through the inevitable ups and downs of life.

The idea of a second-chance economy should be built into the social contract between Americans and their government. In return for paying taxes, participating in elections and obeying the law, citizens should expect the government to invest in an infrastructure of both competition and care that enables them to reach their full potential as workers and human beings. In the 21st century, that should start with providing every citizen with universal high-speed Internet -- as Alan Davidson and Danielle Kehl put it -- "for everyone. Everywhere. Really."

Big ideas for a new America expand well beyond government policy, however.

Consider the future of American manufacturing, which Michael Lind and Joshua Freedman argue lies in "servitization," the transformation of goods into packages of physical products attached to a stream of services.

A John Deere tractor, for instance, comes with an onboard computer that can steer itself, adjust levels of fertilizer, seed and water, and, most importantly, send a continual flow of data back to a 24-hour service line that will in turn tell farmers how to increase productivity and when they need preventive maintenance.

That service line, in turn, is staffed by information and analysis service providers, a huge and expanding category of jobs that will process data coming from virtually every "product" we use in our lives and work, all now connected to each other in the Internet of things.

At the same time, technology shouldn't become an impediment to the American birthright of the pursuit of happiness. We can increase productivity and at the same time, increase leisure.

Other big ideas worth considering include a smart plan to fix our political system: The answer for elections dominated by big donors is to make everyone a political donor.

Mark Schmitt and Zephyr Teachout outline the basic logic of this approach: "If politicians have a broad base of support, they will be far less dependent on the 0.01 percent, even if the big spenders still exist." If the remedy for bad speech is more speech, our classic defense of the First Amendment, then the remedy for distorted democracy is more democracy.

Finally, consider the state of American education. Amid all the justified hand-wringing over our schools, a revolution is about to take place in higher education. Physical campuses will transform or combine with virtual platforms that provide lifelong learning from multiple sources with measurable outcomes.

The key to this transformation, as New America's Amy Laitinen points out, is to start measuring education in terms of learning rather than time. The idea involves the redefinition or even abolition of "the credit hour."

We currently award degrees based on how many "credits" a student receives for a course, which in turn measures how much time he or she has sat in a classroom every week, whether that time was spent listening to the professor or surfing the Web. But students today, many of whom can expect to live to 100 or more, will learn what they need and want to know over a lifetime, in physical school, their workplaces, online and in the school of life. They will be able to prove that they have in fact gained the knowledge they need through a variety of certification measures, all of which will replace "credits" as we know them.

It is so easy to be cynical, to think that talk is cheap and ideas are easy to promote but impossible to implement. I have a different view. Inspiration cannot take flight without ideas to power it.

With inspiration, by contrast, comes a vision of genuine change and the energy, faith, commitment, determination and persistence to make it happen. If our politics are small, it is because our imagination is impoverished, strangled by the belief that nothing big can happen. If we start with ideas -- not just speeches, but real ideas -- the politics will follow.

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