If Americans are feeling ever more insecure about inequality, jobs and globalisation, they are not alone. The concerns of the “anxious middle” income earners are echoed across the Atlantic. But by American standards, European fears about globalisation look like a panicked overreaction to a relatively small problem.

Americans have tended to display a much greater tolerance for the type of economic dislocation that can accompany globalisation. Cheerleaders for the US model say that whatever their public complaints, Americans in practice have a far greater attachment to “creative destruction” – the turnover in jobs and companies by which a market economy adapts to changes wrought by trade or technology.