Who was to blame for this? Not the unions. They did what they were supposed to do: ask for higher pay and more benefits. No, the fault lay with the top corporate managers: it was their job, as capitalists, to deny such increases if they were not justified by productivity trends.

But with a fatal arrogance, executives at American manufacturing companies did allow those increases, in part to maintain a society of contented, trouble-free workers, though executives would also use those increases as cover for their own rapidly swelling compensation. In the 1960s, the average compensation of an American C.E.O. was about 25 times the average compensation of a production worker. That ratio rose to about 70 times by the end of the 1980s, and to around 250 times these days.

It is tragic to hear voices from Detroit declaring themselves ready for a resuscitation of the city. Revival is a question not just of will but also of the available skills base, which unfortunately has deteriorated as a result of a failure to invest in training.

That skills deteriorated is, to a considerable extent, the fault of the unions. Unfortunately, they shared the management class’s shortsighted focus on extracting the maximum amount of compensation from companies, even in the face of the underlying businesses’ failing strength.

Developing the necessary skills base is not a short-term project. It requires decades of concerted effort on many fronts, by many national, regional and local actors, including collaboration among companies, government, trade associations, schools, colleges and universities.

This kind of common purpose, however, is not something that American society, with its ethos of individualism and personal independence, seems capable of undertaking. Doing the right thing for the long haul is typically put off for a later time, if it ever happens.

That such a “strategy” is self-defeating ought to be obvious. Sadly, it is not — not in an instant-gratification world.

Globalization, in many ways, serves as an early warning system for the changes required in a domestic society. No society should have been better prepared to utilize this tool than the United States, given its traditional — but at least for now largely lost — proclivity to embrace change. That it didn’t work out that way is a tragedy of the nation’s own making.