Of course, outsourcing to China and other Asian countries was another important tool. In 1995, the World Trade Organization was born. (China joined in 2001.) Globalization was becoming an unstoppable force, and the WTO was established to set the rules of free trade and serve as referee. In the U.S., globalization meant, among other things, that American companies could swap high-paying jobs in the U.S. for lower-paying jobs abroad. And American consumers could buy imported goods that were cheaper than comparable ones made in the U.S.

Economists, academics, policy makers and journalists all took it as a given that globalization was good for the U.S. Yes, people in the Rust Belt lost their jobs, but other parts of the country gained jobs, didn’t they? I remember in 2006 quoting Diana Farrell, who was the director of the McKinsey Global Institute at the time, telling me that “the process of globalization is wealth-creating for the economy.” (Farrell is now the president and CEO of the JPMorgan Chase Institute.) This, ironically, was in a column about my brother-in-law being forced to shut his costume jewelry business in Rhode Island because the Chinese were stealing his designs and undercutting his prices.

The flaws in this model of capitalism were obvious well before the arrival of the coronavirus. The income inequality that resulted has been a pressing concern for at least a decade; the bulk of the new wealth generated in the economy went to those already wealthy while everyone else saw far fewer gains. (By 2020, according to David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, the top one-tenth of 1% held 15% of the country’s wealth.) The essential ruthlessness of private equity became impossible to ignore. Recall, for instance, the outcry when Bain Capital, Vornado Realty Trust and KKR & Co. closed Toys “R” Us Inc. in 2018, putting some 30,000 people out of work with no severance. A singular focus on share price led to scandals like Enron and the Boeing 737 Max disaster. It led to rising drug prices that many patients couldn’t afford. It led to CEOs in the U.S. making, on average, 320 times more than the average worker by 2019. (In 1965, the ratio was 21 to 1.) And so on.

As for globalization, supply chains became inextricably international, fine-tuned for efficiency and cost. But while economists still viewed this as a net plus, many of them stopped talking about how globalization was a positive for U.S. workers. Their continuing difficulties were simply too obvious to ignore.

In 2015, Larry Fink, the influential CEO of BlackRock Inc., the giant money manager, wrote an open letter to his fellow executives telling them that by capitulating to the pressures of Wall Street with buybacks and the like, they were likely “underinvesting in innovation, skilled workforces or essential capital expenditures necessary to sustain long-term growth.” Two years later, he wrote in his annual letter that while he still supported globalization, “there is little doubt that globalization’s benefits have been shared unequally.” And two years after that, he told the CEOs that “to prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” The combination of climate change and the country’s economic disparities had led Fink to repudiate Milton Friedman’s thesis.

The next year, the Business Roundtable, an organization of nearly 200 CEOs, changed its core statement on the purpose of a corporation. For two decades, it had said that companies should primarily strive to maximize shareholder returns. Its new statement called on companies to deliver value to customers, invest in employees and support the communities in which they reside. Shareholders should be rewarded, yes, but over the long term.

In theory, corporate America seemed to finally understand that the income inequality that had been a crucial consequence of catering to shareholder value had to be reversed if America was going to continue to prosper. But understanding is not the same as doing. After the corporate tax cuts of 2017, companies used the money on—what else?—stock buybacks, with $770 billion worth of stock repurchased in 2018 and an additional $709 billion in 2019. Many retail chains, ravaged after being sucked dry by private equity firms, filed for bankruptcy. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that almost 600,000 jobs were eliminated in 2019, a 10% rise from 2018.

And then came the pandemic.

In the years after World War II, the U.S. had some significant economic advantages when soldiers returned from the war looking for jobs. One, of course, was that the U.S. had escaped the devastation suffered by Europe and Japan, so its companies faced only domestic competition. Labor costs, for instance, were nearly irrelevant, and unions, which played an important role in raising living standards, were able to thrive.

But another advantage, as Rick Wartzman pointed out in his 2017 book The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America, is that American businessmen were unusually farsighted after the war. They knew it was critically important to generate millions of jobs to prevent the U.S. from falling into another depression. And they also knew that returning fighters were owed something for defeating the Nazis. There was a “we’re-all-in-this-together” feeling that came from having been through such a terrible war.