As the Occupy Wall Street protesters have pointed out, the strong global economic growth of the past few decades (not counting the Great Recession) left a lot of people behind. For example, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office recently reported that from 1979 to 2007 the top 1% of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s after-tax income.

A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.