New Delhi, Sept. 16 -- Imagine the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publishing a report tomorrow showing that the GDP of virtually every country on earth-rich and poor, east and west-has been falling year upon year for a decade. Imagine further that it uses a single headline for this report: "Future-Ready Economies."

Imagine that it does not pause to ask, with any seriousness, why the wealth of nations is shrinking in near lockstep across wildly different political systems and policy regimes, offering instead a buffet of generalized explanations-demographic, institutional, a touch of pandemic residue-general enough to explain everything in the world and therefore nothing at all.

And on the one force that has...