Chrystia Freeland

I had breakfast this week with Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, and the main dish on the menu was tough love. In an interview before a packed hall in Times Square, the boss of the more than a century-old $177 billion global behemoth told me that Americans can still win in the global economy — but that they need to fight harder.

“We are not trying that hard,” Immelt said. “We haven’t really tried as hard as we can to compete, educate and sell our products around the world and I think we can do better.

“The world just plays harder than we play,” he said. “Whether it is on exports or whether it is on foreign direct investment, the rest of the world plays for keeps. And we just don’t have a similar philosophy.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has her own reasons for feeling grim, but she can take some comfort from the fact that Immelt pointed to Germany, whose version of capitalism Americans are accustomed to dismissing as plodding and inflexible, as one nation that is outselling the Yanks.

“Chancellor Merkel flies from Berlin to Beijing, there’s 25 German C.E.O.’s that get off the plane right behind her. And they connect the dots. They play hard, they play to win, they play for exports,” Immelt said. “We’re not all-in the same way that the Germans are all-in.”

Those are harsh words to hear from one of the foremost business leaders of the country that likes to think of itself as the world’s top capitalist dog. But Immelt’s must-try-harder message is becoming the conventional wisdom in the United States, and not just among the angry 99 percent of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. The 1 percent think so, too.

One measure of this elite consensus was the echo of Immelt’s remarks in a speech that a different national heavyweight, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, delivered a few blocks north and a couple of days earlier at another New York power breakfast.

“We have to get better at playing offense,” Clinton said. “Other countries are much more on the same team between business and government, and we need to be back on the same American team.”

When populists on both the left and the right are angry enough to take to the streets, and when both a Democratic stateswoman and a Republican industrialist use almost identical language to describe America’s poor performance in the global contest for business, you can safely conclude this is a country suffering from serious self-doubt.

That inner-directed gloom fits uneasily in a national culture that still tilts toward a faith in self-improvement, second chances and, most important of all, a first-place finish. Which is probably why Immelt’s certainty that, if the United States does try harder, “I’m completely convinced that we can compete and we can win” struck such a receptive chord.

“Our competitiveness in this country today is the greatest it’s been in 25 years,” he said. “I have never seen our competitiveness as solid versus India and China as I do today.”

He repeated: “We need to be all-in.”

The competition Immelt and Clinton want U.S. companies to win is the battle for dominance in the global marketplace and for the checkbook of the growing global middle class.

“There are going to be one billion consumers joining the middle class in Asia. I think for us to reduce unemployment, exports are going to be a key way to do it,” Immelt said. “It’s this country’s only destiny just because most of the consumers are some place other than here.”

As a cautionary counterexample, Immelt cited Japan. “Look, when I was a young guy, when I first started with G.E., Jack Welch sent us all to Japan because in those days Japan was gonna crush us,” he said. “And we learned a lot about Japan when we were there. But over the subsequent 30 years, the Japanese companies all fell behind. And the reason why they fell behind is because they didn’t globalize. They didn’t have to go out and sing for their dinner in every corner of the world. That’s not the case with G.E. It’s not the case with other American multinationals.”

Immelt’s sunny enthusiasm for export-led growth captivated his audience. That is partly because Immelt is a consummate salesman — and proud of it. As he said, “first and foremost my job is to sell jet engines, gas turbines and scanners. That’s my job.”

After an hour of listening to him, I felt a strong urge to buy a gas turbine myself, and I eavesdropped on several conversations about what a great senator or even president a post-G.E. Immelt would make.

But it is also because an open global economy in which everyone is getting richer and in which a reinvigorated United States has the confidence to win appeals both to American patriots and to American internationalists.

As with all dream scenarios, though, there is a catch or two. The first is that export-led growth is a terrific strategy — there’s a reason everyone is looking these days to Germany and China — but it only works if some countries are taking the opposite tack of building their economies around consumption. As Lawrence H. Summers, a former secretary of the Treasury, likes to point out, there are no Martians. The whole world can’t be German or Chinese — you also need some Americans and Greeks, and the long-term fate of those consumer nations isn’t so pretty.

The second, related catch is that, for all the talk of Team Germany and Team U.S.A., that’s only partly how the world economy works. Immelt is proudly and emphatically American — “I love the U.S., period” — but he told me that his successor might well come from the emerging markets. That’s no surprise: Smart businesses have figured out how to globalize. We don’t yet know if countries can do the same.

On a drizzly evening in Zuccotti Park this week, where the Occupy Wall Street protesters are camped out with the modern revolutionary’s gear of iPhone, blue tarp and cappuccino, I spotted one young man wearing a T-shirt with an image of Ronald Reagan and the words “Bad Religion.”

It was the right outfit for the occasion. That’s because the greatest significance of the wave of leftist demonstrations that started in Lower Manhattan and rippled across the United States over the past few weeks is the potential challenge it poses to the Reagan Revolution.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama drew shrieks from the Democratic base, particularly its Clinton wing, by naming Ron rather than Bill as a president who had “changed the trajectory of America.”

But Obama was right. We are all living in a world shaped by Reagan and his ideology of small “l” liberalism.

Three decades later, the triumph of Reaganism is remarkable. In the United States and Britain taxes shrank, regulation, especially of the financial sector, was pruned back, and state companies were sold off. Even Brussels was nudged toward liberalization.

The impact on the rest of the world was even more profound. Soviet Communism collapsed, China converted to capitalism and entered the world economy, India dismantled its protectionist License Raj, and many emerging market economies in Latin America and Africa embraced liberalization as the path to growth.

“Going back to the 1970s and 1980s is crucial,” said Branko Milanovic, a World Bank economist and author of The Haves and the Have-Nots, a 2010 book about income disparity around the world. “The ideology drove everything that happened in the next 30 years. Deng Xiaoping captured it best — ‘to get rich is glorious.”’

One result has been an unprecedented global economic boom. Its biggest beneficiaries have been some of the world’s poorest people, particularly in China and India: Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank have found that between 1981 and 2005, the number of people living in poverty in the developing world fell by 500 million. The West prospered as well, with relatively strong and consistent economic growth over the past three decades.

But something else has been happening, too. The triumph of economic liberalization has coincided with a sharp increase in income inequality. The growing gap is a worldwide phenomenon — it has been most striking in the United States and China, but income inequality has also grown, especially in the last past decade, in most developed countries, and in many emerging markets.

“What we now call the Reagan Revolution was a turning point in the American economy,” said Jacob S. Hacker, a political science professor at Yale University in Connecticut and author, with Paul Pierson, of Winner-Take-All Politics. “These patterns of rising inequality were established then.”

Economists, most notably Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the data jocks who are the gurus of income inequality studies, have been pointing out the growing gap for a decade. But, particularly in the United States, which still determines the ideological weather for the rest of the world, that increasingly skewed distribution failed to catch fire as a political issue.

“Among elite opinion, this wasn’t talked about,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York and author of The Price of Civilization, published this month, told me. “It was viewed as impolite, it was viewed as class warfare.”

One reason the rest of society went along with that reticence is suggested by University of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan, in his 2010 book Fault Lines — that the credit bubble of the 1990s and 2000s masked the stagnating wages of the U.S. middle class.

The financial crisis of 2008 brought that self-deception to an abrupt halt. And while the middle class is still in the doldrums, the top 1 percent has largely recovered, thanks in part to muscular intervention by the state. That one-two punch is why the old American taboo on talking about income distribution is lifting, particularly in Zuccotti Park.

“‘Class warfare’ has seldom had much traction in American politics because Americans tend to idealize the ‘free market’ as a separate sphere of life, with its own (rough) justice,” Larry M. Bartels, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and author of “Unequal Democracy,” wrote in an e-mail reply to my questions.

“Escalating inequality and the wreckage of the Great Recession may now be focusing increasing anger on that top sliver — especially bankers, who are, conveniently, prominently implicated in the malfeasance that led to the financial meltdown of 2008 and (still) immensely rich.”

But the left shouldn’t declare victory quite yet. That’s because the anger of the United States’ squeezed middle class is also being harnessed by the right, and, at least so far, with greater and more focused political effect.

If you doubt that the winner-take-all U.S. economy is one of the Tea Party’s inspirations, consider the remarks this week by its heroine, Sarah Palin. In a speech in Seoul, she railed against “crony capitalism,” complaining that “well-connected banks get bailed out” and “certain companies get special deals through governments.”

Palin’s remedy to crony capitalism is to double down on the Reagan Revolution — lower taxes and shrink government further. Progressives have not yet come up with a solution of such seductive simplicity. Their standard prescription — higher taxes, more regulation, a stronger social welfare net, and more investment in education — may be sensible. But it lacks the rallying power of Palin’s call to smash crony capitalism by depriving the elites of their political tool — big government.

Even the energized protesters in Zuccotti Park know their left-leaning populist movement has found its complaint — “we are the 99 percent” — but not its remedy. They heard as much from Slavoj Zizek, the best-selling Slovenian philosopher, who was this week’s celebrity intellectual speaker: “We know what we do not want. But what do we want?”

After a lecture on income inequality and its pernicious consequences delivered on the square on Tuesday by Sara Burke, a policy analyst at a New York research organization, and illustrated with charts from I.M.F. economists, one listener said she was keen to “educate” people about the issue. But to do that, she wanted Burke to help her with something: “What’s my sound bite?”

The politician who answers that question will be the Reagan of the left.

Immigration is always a hot issue when the economy is weak and jobs are scarce, so it should be no surprise that it has jumped to the top of the political agenda in Europe and the United States. But much of the debate today around these centuries-old themes of us vs. them and newcomer vs. old-timer is missing an essential point: in the age of the Internet, the jet airplane and the multinational company, the very concepts of immigration, citizenship and even statehood are changing.

“This is the new wave, the new trend,” Wang Huiyao, founder and president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, told me. “We had the globalization of trade, we had the globalization of capital, and now we have the globalization of talent.”

Wang recalled that three decades ago, when he first came to North America as a student, there was only one flight a day to China. Today, he said, “there are two or three dozen, if not more.”

As a result, instead of immigration being a single journey with a fixed starting point and end point, Wang said many Chinese have become what he calls “seagulls,” going back and forth between San Francisco or Vancouver, British Columbia, and Beijing or Shanghai. He is a seagull himself: I spoke to Wang on the phone from Washington; he is spending the academic year at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Massachusetts; his institute is in Beijing; and he still owns an apartment in Vancouver, where he once lived.

Airplanes and the continent-hopping professional lives they have made possible are only part of the story. The cheap, instant and often nearly constant communication made possible by the technology revolution has further fundamentally altered the experience of moving away from home.

“Because telecommunications is everywhere and is so cheap, people never really leave their communities,” Mark Podlasly, founder of the Brookmere Management Group, a Vancouver consulting firm, told me. “You can leave but still have a 24/7 connection with your home community. People are never really gone. You can be a citizen anywhere.”

I met Podlasly at the Banff Forum, an annual gathering of Canadian business people, politicians and scholars, at which he presented research on global expatriate networks as part of a panel discussion of citizenship and immigration. One of Podlasly’s conclusions was that governments and government policy need to catch up with the new reality of immigration.

That is very much the view of Professor Mark Boyle, a migration expert at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. “Citizenship law is struggling to catch up with the new realities of global work,” he told me. “It is still based on the notion of a sedentary population, rather than the nomadic population that many of us have become.”

One of the biggest shifts is in the thinking about what we used to call “brain drain.”

“Increasingly, immigrants who live elsewhere are being viewed as assets,” Boyle said. “This is a paradigm shift; this is a seismic shift. The notion of brain drain is ridiculed — instead, it is ‘brain circulation.’ The notion is that people can return as tourists, that people can be ambassadors for their home countries, that people can serve as business agents.”

“It is no longer about brain drain, or even brain gain,” Wang agreed. “It is about global brain circulation.”

One of the countries that uses its diaspora most effectively, Boyle says, is India. “India is increasingly looking to its diaspora as an asset,” Boyle said. “Many people argue that India’s technology development would not have happened without the overseas population, particularly in Silicon Valley. So the government has had to rethink its attitudes to its citizens. India has set up a whole government ministry solely to look after the expat Indians.”

Podlasly said that some countries have figured out how to use their diasporas so effectively that “they aren’t always bringing them back; they want them out there.”

An example he admires is GlobalScot, a publicly funded organization that brings together top Scottish business people working outside the country with Scottish companies hoping to export their goods or services. An outside consulting firm estimated that between 2004-06, GlobalScot added more than £28 million to the Scottish economy.

Attitudes toward these global citizens can get more complicated in the countries they live and work in, even as they retain their ties and emotional connections to their original homes. The cherished American idea of the melting pot, after all, is largely about cutting ties with the old country.

But Boyle said that in the age of globalization, a diaspora closely connected with its country of origin could be as economically valuable for its host country as it is for its native one: “Diasporas are a win-win. Silicon Valley wins, and the home country wins.”

That’s a big shift. But some countries and policy makers are predicting our concept of citizenship will soon be stretched even further — that we will go from Wang’s seagulls to thinking of countries as virtual, rather than physical, communities. In a presentation to the Canadian government in 2008, Alison Loat of the Samara Project argued, “Canadians can no longer be thought of as only those living in the territory above North America’s 49th parallel, but more accurately as a potential network of people spanning the globe.”

Boyle said that New Zealand, with its geographical isolation, small population and large number of expatriates, has taken this idea the furthest: “New Zealand is fundamentally re-imagining what it means to talk about the New Zealand nation. New Zealand is saying that it is at once a small island tucked away from the rest of the world and at the same time a globally networked nation with populations sprinkled across the globe.”

Living as we do in the age of Facebook, we shouldn’t be surprised that some countries are starting to imagine themselves more as social networks than as a physical place.