How Canada’s ‘Minister of Everything’ Sees the World

She argued that community represented a “new plutocracy” around the world, one that was preoccupied with creating wealth, starting philanthropic foundations, and combatting economic regulations. “America really does need many of its plutocrats,” she wrote, but what it needed them to do most is what they least wanted to: share their wealth.

“Is Capitalism in Trouble?” (December 2013)

Freeland returned to the economy’s global elite, but this time focused on those among the group who, rather than working to preserve the current state of Western capitalism, were concerned that it had become dysfunctional.

“What made it possible to sell this version of capitalism to society was the promise that if businesses were allowed to simply get on with the job, all of us would be better off,” she wrote. But following the financial crisis, some executives were working to restore a model more like the one that dominated in the 1950s and ’60s, when “America’s business leaders widely believed they were responsible to the community as a whole, not just shareholders.”

“The Disintegration of the World” (May 2015)

“I believe that capitalist democracy has proved itself to be the only compelling, universalist vision of how to live the good life,” Freeland wrote. “But,” she argued, a “stable world order” had failed to emerge following the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite promises that globalization and the spread of market democracy would bring on a “golden age.”

What had resulted instead, she observed, was radicalism, polarization, and “economic malaise.” She argued that to succeed in the uneasy new state of the world, businesses would have to embrace the more sustainable philosophy of capitalism that she wrote about in 2013.

“Companies not only need to account for … internationality,” she wrote. “They also need to show that they are invested in the greater good.”

Annika Neklason is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.