If you look at the stock market only in terms of its valuation — how much you have to spend to buy shares for each dollar of corporate earnings you are capturing — the stock market drop in recent weeks can be explained in significant part by the rise in longer-term rates in the same period.

If you look at the price-earnings ratio of the S.&P. 500 stocks, for example, and invert it to view it as the earnings-to-price ratio, it was 4.77 percent on Sept 1, meaning buying $100 bought you $4.77 worth of corporate profits. After the stock drop, that had risen to 5.23 percent.

The jump closely parallels the rise in longer-term bond yields, which, again, are mostly driven by an improving growth outlook. The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds has risen to 3.13 percent from 2.85 percent in that same span.

Higher interest rates have made bonds more attractive, and it makes perfect sense that investors would demand a more favorable valuation from stocks given that alternative.

The story might be different if investors believed that higher growth would feed disproportionately into higher corporate profits. But the current economic moment offers plenty of reason to think it won’t.

Earlier in the expansion, there might have been lots of workers on the sidelines, and companies had leverage with their suppliers. But there are signs that is changing, like recent comments by 3M and Caterpillar that their input costs were rising, which helped kick off the recent bout of market weakness.

This is bad news for stocks and for the bottom lines of the largest companies, but good news for American workers. When you hear a phrase on a corporate call like “input costs are rising,” keep in mind that the wages you receive are one of those costs.