In 1965 the average CEO earned 20 times what the average worker took home. Now, with globalization expanding the reach of CEOs and depressing the wages of factory-floor workers, that ratio is over 300-to-1. This rise in inequality has caused critics of the American capitalist system to begin to question just how our corporations are governed. And whether our current market-based economic system is fit for purpose in a globalized economy.

We’ve been there before. In the 1930s Mussolini’s fascist system made the trains run on time, Hitler’s National Socialism revived the German economy, and Stalin’s communist utopia made a successful dash towards industrialization. Each in its turn attracted supporters who, oblivious to the horrors of these other systems, would replace America’s then-staggering economic system. After World War II, it was Sweden’s “middle way” that became the model which many Americans, mostly on the left, hoped would replace ours. And now it is China’s centrally managed, high-growth economy that has caught the eye not only of Americans unhappy with our sluggish recovery but with what they see as rising inequality here, never mind that corruption has produced even greater wealth disparities in the People’s Republic.