Shipping problems will eventually be sorted out, and covid outbreaks will mercifully ebb. But the current problems in Shanghai hint at an issue that portends potentially higher prices for a good long time: The globe-spanning “just in time” supply chains that made everything so marvelously cheap also left us quite vulnerable to disruptions. Companies began rethinking those supply chains during the pandemic, and they are apt to reconsider further in a time of rising geostrategic tensions.

Meanwhile, governments are rethinking immigration, that other great vehicle of globalization, which the pandemic brought to a near halt. The Biden administration, for example, has kept many Trump-era immigration and trade restrictions in place, and while the administration just announced it would let the immigration restrictions expire at the end of next month, this move has proved controversial even within the president’s party.

Without more trade and immigration, however, we are bound to see upward price pressure. The mass movements of workers from occupations such as subsistence agriculture to higher valued work in manufacturing or services has lifted hundreds of millions out of dire poverty, but also enriched the rest of us, not by giving us more money, but by letting us buy more with the money we had.