IN THEIR MORE SOBER AND REFLECTIVE MOMENTS, the captains of industry have recognized that a broad and healthy middle class is indispensable to their interests, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, economic self-interest: Henry Ford realized early on that if he paid his workers enough to buy the cars they produced, he would sell more cars than if he paid them the subsistence wages that were the standard for industrial enterprises at the time. This became so widely adopted that it was named after him — “Fordism” — and contributed greatly to the 20th-century rise of the American middle class.

Secondly, improving the lot of the middle class was a way to literally save their own necks, i.e., to buy insurance against social unrest and revolution. Places in the world that have a few oligarchs lording it over a vast, unwashed peasantry are places that are more or less constantly on the verge of armed revolution, and revolutions are both bad for business and also sometimes involve things like guillotines and gallows. If the lowest classes have a middle class into which they can aspire to ascend, that tends to keep their minds off torches and pitchforks.

The problem is that capitalism, left to its own devices, does not naturally produce a middle class. As economist and author of the landmark 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” Thomas Piketty wrote, “There is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces (in capitalism) from prevailing permanently.” The equilibrium state of capitalism is actually pretty close to the aforementioned oligarchs and peasants scenario.

Karl Marx was right about some things: Capitalism really does have a tendency to destroy itself by concentrating wealth and power so much at the top that it deprives the economy of demand. He was too much of a determinist about it, and his suggested remedies were morally deficient and economically unrealistic — but the gist of his insight has been proven by well over a century of empirical experience. Acknowledging that he was right about that doesn’t make one a communist; it does impose the responsibility to come up with a better solution than Marx did.

Our own recent history provides us with at least one “better solution”: the 30 or so years after World War II featured steady-to-booming growth and the huge expansion of a vast and prosperous middle class.

Between 1945 and the early 1970s, the rate of wage increases closely tracked the rate of productivity growth in the economy, and the result was a virtuous cycle of ever-greater demand and persistently low inflation. While the war was a decisive factor early in that period — the competitors to American manufacturers had been bombed to flaming ruins, and it took them a few years to rebuild — this situation was primarily the result of government policy after the war.

I’ve mentioned several of those policies in this space before, but to briefly review: the postwar period in the United States was characterized by high marginal tax rates, support for the unionization of the workforce, vast public works programs (the Interstate Highway System, for example) and various protections designed to protect the wages of American workers from foreign competition.

I’ve discussed the unravelling of that postwar regime before in this space, as well, but today I thought I’d focus on that last item — wage protection — and, more broadly, trade policy.

As American workers have been forced to compete with workers in developing countries who earn a small fraction of an American’s pay, globalization has devastated the U.S. manufacturing sector. On the other hand, globalization has also lifted many millions of those overseas workers out of abject poverty, and expanded the global middle class. (When I was a kid, my mom would encourage me to eat my vegetables because the “starving people in India” would be grateful for what I had. These days, given the rapid economic progress made by India, it is Indian mothers who are chiding their children that they have it much better than the children in sub-Saharan Africa, or wherever.) So, globalism is by no means a bad thing.

That said, I think it is necessary to make sure that our economy can provide a middle-class wage to more than just the college-educated portion of our workforce, who, for a variety of reasons, will never be more than half of all workers. (I arrived at that figure using the ethnic group in America with the highest rate of college attendance, East Asians, as a proxy for the maximum.)

How do we do this?

One possibility — and there will be time and space to name more later — would be to include in future trade agreements a provision that any company that wants to sell in a particular country has to produce what they sell in that country. There are obvious limits to this — I can imagine it would not be cost effective to establish an auto manufacturing business in, say, the island nation of Vanuatu — but for nations over a certain population, this would work just fine.

China already has a de facto policy to this effect: Buick sells lots of cars there, and almost all are made in China. American workers would benefit from a similar regime here.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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