The pandemic also cast light on the elites’ attitudes toward work. Many politicians like to proclaim the dignity of work. “A job is a lot more than a paycheck,” Joe Biden’s father used to say, according to the president. “Joey, it’s about your respect, your dignity, your place in the community.” Yet a great deal of policy making since March 2020—months-long prohibitions on gainful labor, cash payments to able-bodied people—did not reflect that sentiment. Hasty and ill-defined appeals to public health were all Western political leaders needed to decree lengthy cessations to productive labor. A German TV ad suggested that the young could achieve heroism by doing absolut gar nichts—absolutely nothing. Can we conclude from this that we no longer really believe in the dignity of work? Mr. Snead thinks so. “Work isn’t just about production of value in the economic sense or even having money to live.” He reads a line from Pope John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical, “Laborem Exercens”: “Work is a good thing for man—a good thing for his humanity—because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being.’ ” “It seems to me,” Mr. Snead says, “that elite ‘opinion makers’ and ‘thought leaders’ ”—he gestures with air quotes—“who only need a laptop and high-speed internet to do their jobs have forgotten the vast number of their fellow citizens whose work actually requires in-person, face-to-face contact. . . . That, I think, reflects a failure to remember one’s neighbor, or anyway the neighbor who isn’t part of”—air quotes again—“the ‘knowledge economy.’ That’s bad enough. But the notion that one can make up for the loss merely by paying people to stay home is evidence we’ve forgotten that work itself is essential to human flourishing.”