The Business Roundtable made news last month. Breaking decades of fidelity to "shareholder capitalism," it declared corporations should serve their communities as well as their owners.

Skeptics dismissed that as "virtue-signaling" to mollify the anti-business left. But what if the Roundtable signaled a broader turning point, toward reordering America's relationship with the free market itself?

Early 21st century discord in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere points toward that possibility. And "The Economists' Hour," a compelling new book by New York Times journalist Binyamin Appelbaum, helps explain how we got here.

Appelbaum traces the rising influence of economists, and the values their discipline embodies, in government decision-making since World War II. Milton Friedman, along with John Maynard Keynes the most influential among them, ushered in the concept of shareholder capitalism in 1970.

Against a Cold War backdrop pitting capitalism against communism, both Democrats and Republicans embraced market forces as the way to sustain prosperity and solve social problems simultaneously. They produced mixed results.

Consumers and business owners benefited more than workers without special skills. Millions lost their livelihoods to foreign competition.

Soviet communism collapsed, and living standards rose in the developing world. Yet rising integration with the global economy didn't halt the long-term slowdown in U.S. growth.

"The embrace of markets lifted billions of people around the world from abject poverty," Appelbaum writes. "Nations have been tied together by the flows of goods and money and ideas, and most of the world's 7.7 billion people live wealthier, healthier and happier lives as a consequence."

He adds: "But the market revolution went too far. In the United States and in other developed nations, it has come at the expense of economic equality, of the health of liberal democracy and of future generations."

In impressive detail, Appelbaum catalogs the ways that revolution reached beyond conventional economic policy. As Americans rebelled against the Vietnam draft, for example, economists advocated the superiority of an all-volunteer force. Volunteers have fought every war since.

To sustain the 1960s boom, Keynesians offered fiscal stimulus from tax cuts and spending increases. To curb inflation, Friedmanites prescribed tight monetary policy even at the cost of a brutal early-1980s recession. To boost stagnant growth, supply-siders promoted one tax cut after another.