EARLIER this year a Federal Reserve official tried to tamp down worries about inflation by noting that, while food and petrol were getting more expensive, you could now buy an iPad that was twice as powerful for the same price as the previous model. The remark, soon lampooned as “Let them eat iPads”, predictably drew derision. But it typified a tactic to which American leaders frequently turn when they need a rejoinder to economic doomsaying: cite an Apple product.

As bad as their politics has got, Americans could always comfort themselves with the knowledge that their business leaders, entrepreneurs and workers were the most dynamic and innovative in the world. But they may look back on 2011 and see three events that undermine that story: the downgrade of America's credit rating; the last flight of the space shuttle; and Mr Jobs's death. The first, coming as it did on the heels of a debilitating and entirely pointless fight over raising the debt ceiling, captures how American political dysfunction has undermined the economy's institutional pillars. The latter two symbolised the waning of, respectively, American public and private technological pre-eminence.

Of course, it would be foolish to count out Apple, much less an entire economy, because of one man's death. Yet even if Apple remains as successful as it has been under Mr Jobs, that success long ago decoupled from that of the broader economy. Written on the back of my iPod are the words, “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China.” It was classic Jobs: reframing an issue, the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs, as something inspirational rather than discouraging. The low-skill assembly jobs and the middle-class lives they provided may be leaving for Asian shores, but the brainy, wealth-creating parts of the process—the design, the engineering, the marketing—were firmly rooted in Silicon Valley. Free traders (including me) loved to cite the research that finds far more of the value in an iPod is added in America than in China.

But behind this glowing story of synergy between American brains and Chinese brawn lay a more disturbing reality. American global economic leadership has, in the last decade, benefited an ever narrower slice of its people. They have become fabulously wealthy, while the vast majority of job growth has been in areas like education and health care, where productivity and wages are stagnant, a trend well documented by Michael Spence. American global business leadership used to be personified by the likes of General Motors, Caterpillar, General Electric and Eastman Kodak. As they lost market share to foreign competitors, shifted employment overseas or flirted with bankruptcy, the focus turned to technology companies like Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard. Microsoft and Cisco are both fine, though in recent years they have undergone layoffs and seen their market values shrink to a fraction of their bubble-era peaks. Hewlett Packard, of course, is flailing around for a new business model, and is seeking to exit the personal-computer business altogether.

Americans' entrepreneurial self-esteem is now embodied by Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. These are indeed fabulously innovative companies with world-beating business models. Yet one wonders if they are increasingly the exception, not the rule, and if the passing of Mr Jobs is simply the most prominent example of a broader decline in American entrepreneurship. According to JPMorgan, in the late 1990s, employment at start-up companies regularly grew 1.2m per quarter. That has fallen to 700,000 since the current recovery began. John Haltiwanger, probably the leading economist on employment dynamics by firm size, finds similar trends.

Entrepreneurship and innovation, of course, are not the same thing. Yet even if American innovation is fundamentally sound, there remains the more unsettling problem of how narrowly its fruits are shared. If you want to know why the Senate is on the verge of passing a bill punishing China for its trade practices, look no further than this fact: Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon collectively employ just 113,000 people, a third of GM's payroll in 1980. Naturally, as Adam Smith pointed out long ago, the sole purpose of production is consumption, so one should not scoff at the benefits these companies create for Americans in their other role as consumers rather than workers. And in truth, technological advancement has probably done far more than trade to hollow out the middle class and widen inequality. Slapping China with punitive tariffs is more likely to trigger a trade war than restore millions of middle-class jobs.

But this is not a message that resonates with voters, or Congress. Both suspect that globalisation has done far more to benefit companies' shareholders and their bankers than rank-and-file workers. That is the conviction of the people now occupying Wall Street, even if they lack coherent plans for dealing with it. And one can't blame them for suspecting the administration's motives when its ambassador to China delivers a speech that so prominently takes up the cause of American credit-card companies. Of course, Visa and Mastercard are as deserving of government support in foreign markets as any metal-bending company; but they only employ 12,600 people worldwide.

It would be unfair to lay this all at the feet of American politicians: widening inequality and the decline of middle-class manufacturing jobs is a global phenomenon that vexes governments everywhere. Yet this does not excuse American governance for making matters worse. There are lots of things it could do to improve the ability of and incentives for American companies and workers to innovate and grow, whether it's taxing fossil fuels, giving more green cards to foreign scientists and engineers or simplifying the tax code. These days, however, that seems a fantasy compared to more prosaic demands such as, don't shut down the government, starve critical government agencies of funds or default on the national debt. If America is going to hold on to its technological mojo, it needs all the help it can get.