I would certainly agree with that.
But some measure of that was a negative sum game, particularly where outsourcing took formerly solid middle-class jobs away from entire US communities.
Which was totally foreseeable.
One of the things I’ve said here before is that the ‘ownership’ class made conscious (and gleeful) decisions to displace substantial domestic workforces in large swaths, leaving them Dollar General and OxyContin in exchange.
We created the rust belt in – relatively – extremely short order.
Did we lift the fortunes of huge numbers of desperately poor people in other parts of the world ? Yes. But the dramatic degree to which it happened, and the degree to which, domestically, it was a huge zero sum game was unnecessary.
And now we have a significant amount of domestic poverty, which – while nowhere near as crushing as the kind of poverty seen elsewhere in the world – is nearly intractable, because the infrastructure for upward mobility doesn’t really exist where US poverty is the worst.
Which are the kind of problems we could identify, quantify, and attack, with both the will (to your point, it would require less navel gazing) and the dedication of resources.
But – America being America – we default to the solutions that create profit for somebody, rather than seek to address root causes or ameliorate the misery piece directly.