Beaudry also raised the question of whether the putative advantages of free market capitalism are failing in the context of global competition and the information revolution. “Something has been going wrong with the competitive system,” he told me.

Other economists cite findings supportive of Beaudry’s thesis that the United States is undergoing a fundamental transformation.

Loukas Karabarbounis, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Global Decline of the Labor Share,” wrote in an email “that it is worthwhile to think about trends in these objects jointly. 2000 seems to be a year where the labor share [of national income] decline started accelerating in the United States.”

Similarly, Ezra Oberfield, a professor of economics at Princeton who has focused on the division of income between capital and labor, wrote that labor’s share of manufacturing income “fell about three times faster in the 2000-2010 period than the 1970-1999 period.”

Further support for the inflection point thesis can be found in a Brookings paper, “The Decline of the U.S. Labor Share,” by three economists, Michael Elsby of the University of Edinburgh, and Bart Hobijn and Aysegul Sahin, both of the Federal Reserve. They write:

“The substantial recent decline in the labor share that emerged at the turn of the 21st century appears wholly due to a slow-down in growth marked by a profound, and unprecedentedly sharp, stagnation of hourly compensation growth.”

The authors argue that import competition is the driving factor:

“Our data yield one robust correlation: that declines in payroll shares are more severe in industries that face larger increases in competitive pressures from imports.” This accounts for “3.3 percentage points of the 3.9 percentage-point decline in the U.S. payroll share over the past quarter century.”

Their predictions of future trends are not optimistic:

“If globalization continues during the next decades, the labor share will continue to decline, especially in sectors that face the largest increases in foreign competition.”

The trends in globalization, wealth concentration, corporate profits, income and employment together raise a crucial question, one I first explored in a column a couple of years ago: Is the “legitimacy of free market capitalism in America facing fundamental challenges?”

This question is even more salient now.

A CNBC/Burson-Marsteller international survey released on Sept. 22 found that in the United States, the world’s free market leader, only 36 percent of the public described corporations as a source of hope, just under the 37 percent who described them as a source of fear. In China, a decisive 84 percent described corporations as a source of hope and only 7 percent said corporations were a source of fear.

In addition, half (51 percent) of the United States sample said “’strong and influential’ corporations are ‘bad,’ even if they are promoting innovation and growth,” according to a summary of the survey by Don Baer, chairman and C.E.O. of Burson-Marsteller.