The Covid-19 outbreak marks the end of a golden age. For 75 years, we have been getting richer, freer and more interconnected. The economic liberalisation that followed the Second World War led to an unprecedented increase in human happiness. Wars became rarer. Famines, long considered inescapable, were all but eliminated. Literacy and longevity soared; violence and oppression plummeted. Why? Because countries that had previously had closed or communist economies gradually joined the global market.

The trouble is, we never made the effort to understand what was driving the enrichment. Indeed, we mulishly refused to believe that it was happening at all. Since 1945, the population of the world has roughly tripled, while the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen by roughly two thirds. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty has fallen by around 90 per cent. Yet only 10 per cent of us believe that there has been any decline at all.

We are equally gloomy, and equally mistaken, about life expectancy, global inequality and access to education. The Swedish physician, Hans Rosling, who used to poll people about the state of the world, liked to joke that if the answers were written on bananas and tossed to chimpanzees, the chimps would pick the correct banana far more often than the temperamentally pessimistic humans.

That innate pessimism, so useful to our hunter-gatherer forebears but so misleading today, explains why we are reacting to the coronavirus by hunkering down, banning flights and moaning about global supply chains. We are thinking primevally, not rationally. Our lizard brains respond to an unfamiliar illness by wanting to shut everything out.

There is no scientific case for banning travel especially not from countries with similar rates of infection to your own. But, in times of stress, we fall back on our tribal heuristics, seeing strangers as likelier carriers of pathogens. Our mood will almost certainly harden as fear of infection gives way to actual infection.

Psychologists have long known that people who are suffering from cold or flu-like symptoms become grumpier in their personality and more authoritarian in their politics.

For two weeks now, we have been reading articles about how pandemics are a product of globalisation. We ought, say a hundred armchair experts, to reduce our dependence on places like China. We should grow more of our own food and, come to that, manufacture more of our own vaccines.

Again, these are arguments that address themselves to our inner caveman. They feel intuitive, but they are quite wrong. Pandemics are not a product of globalisation. In 1348, the Bishop of Bath wrote that a catastrophic pestilence from the East has arrived in a neighbouring kingdom and threatened to stretch its poisonous branches into this realm.

He was right. Around 50 per cent of the population perished. The central expectation this time is that the mortality rate will be around half of 1 per cent catastrophic enough by modern standards, but hardly a product of globalisation.

Nor does self-sufficiency offer security. Many countries used to aim to produce most or all of their food, and the consequences were often calamitous. Localised production is vulnerable to localised shocks: bad harvests, natural disasters, vermin.

The true guarantor of food security is the ability to draw on a dispersed web of global supply. The country with the cheapest food in the world is Singapore, which does not produce one edible ounce itself. At the other end of the scale, the only state which still experiences man-made famines is North Korea, where self-sufficiency is the ruling ideology.

The globalisation on which our wealth rests was never the subject of much debate. Few electorates were convinced by it. It simply happened and, because it worked, people went along with it. The trouble is that its foundations were always fragile. Bad is stronger than good, as the pioneering behavioural psychologist Amos Tversky liked to say. People will take for granted the creation of any number of jobs in retail, financial services, biotech, law, programming or the audio-visual sector. But close one shipyard and, supposedly, globalisation has failed.

Even before the epidemic began, a reaction was setting in. Protectionism was on the rise in Washington, Brussels and Beijing. Even in Right of centre circles, people were warning against the dogma of capitalism, and mouthing platitudes about markets serving society rather than the other way around. But there is nothing dogmatic about support for free markets.

It is based on what works empirically, not what feels right. Far from being ideological, it rests on the idea that we shouldnt impose our ideologies on other people. As for the idea of a market serving society, abstract nouns make poor servants. The market is not a living entity that can be put to work. It is better understood as an absence of coercive rules, a readiness to let affairs arrange themselves.

These arguments, hard to win at the best of times, are almost impossible to voice when people are panicking in the face of an impending plague.

We will look back at the period from 1945 to 2020 as the moment when freedom was given its chance and proved its worth, but was abandoned anyway. Open markets lifted billions from poverty, added decades to our lives, gave us powers that previous generations attributed to wizards or gods. And we never noticed.

Read more:
Globalisation brought us unprecedented riches. Now were throwing them away - Telegraph.co.uk