Parts, Structures, Systems and Outcomes

We've brought up to the special section a couple of interesting articles that dig into the common misperception that the middle class is dying (which argument we gave considerable attention to last time on the other side). In fact there are deeper currents running which will define what we become over the next several decades. Also highlighted is a consequence of the emergence of a new world system in military affairs - the re-discovery of Counter-Insurgency operations.

Which turns out to be working remarkbly well in Iraq - largely because the US military has re-discovered what it already knew; and also because we're re-learning that one must understand and adapt to the local culture. Speaking of which there's a nice set of articles outlining the extraordinary, real difficulties facing Pakistan based on things as they are, not as our policy makers would wish them to be. Another example of pursuing policy based on what one thinks should be true rather than the facts on the ground, in the ME section.

Speaking of adaptation one of the most momentus will be China's, as well as the world's reations to China. Internally China faces THE fundamental challenge of re-inventing its institutional infrastructure. Assumming they can hold it together though, the region around them will be forced willy-nilly into new economic patterns as they re-emerge to the level of economic power that was traditionally their's thruout history.

Other areas of the world aren't doing as well as China - in particular our neighbors to the South are rapidly being forced to confront the lack of investment in their oil fields as revenue was diverted to support social programs. Argentina appears to be embarking on a similar path. In some ways Mexico's challenges, because of physical proximity, are among the most important we'll have to deal with.

On the domestic front Healthcare is moving to the front of the line as a major policy issue (as it darn well should) in this election and there's a nice survey of the different candidates positions and proposals. Turning to Culture and Science there are some very interesting articles.

Perhaps the biggest new wave to emerge in biology is in fact based on systems thinking - that is don't disassemble the car and try to extrapolate the vehicle from the battery. This holds as much promise for future new industries and changes in our ways of life and well-being as any other single change going on.

On the other side there's a fascinating historical portrait of the late Ming period from a gentlemen's memoirs - written by a Chinese mandarin of wealth and distinction who lived thru the collapse of the Ming, a great dynasty, thru more attention going to poetry and theatre than actually running a good army. In the same section are two articles on the history and evolution of modern classical music. Talk about the sadness of refusing to adapt ! Should we wonder how well our modern societies will do in pursuit of our Shibboleths ?

Has it ever struck you that music is a good mirror of society - on both the popular and the high culture level ? That it captures and represents key believes and is itself a set of Shibboleths of sorts ? Popular, or folk, music captures the concerns of the broader population. Art music represents the outlook of the folks who shape a societies thinking. And 20th C classical music reflects all the sturm und drang of the century.

Special & General

 The Myth of Middle-Class Job Loss Americans are doing just fine adjusting to the loss of heavy manufacturing work. Economic change is a messy process. New technologies open up many opportunities for those prepared to take advantage of them. At the same time, old firms and their workers are displaced and forced to start over. In 1900, for example, 40% of the U.S. work force was involved in agriculture. Today, that figure is less than 2%, and no serious observer would argue that we are worse off as a result of this transformation. Yet many of today's most prominent politicians and pundits are making an updated version of precisely this argument. Here's the bottom line: For three-quarters of the workforce (women and the top half of male earners), economic growth translated into earnings gains. But for male workers in the bottom half of the earnings distribution, the decline of unionized manufacturing employment has led to the drying up of some middle-class jobs for those with no post-secondary education. For the clear majority of the workforce, then, the job market has become more welcoming, not less so. But where are these jobs? Undeniably, some people have been left out of this middle-class workforce expansion and need help in making the transition to the new economy. In particular, the last six years have seen very little wage growth for the bottom 80% of the workforce. But we should bear in mind that real gross domestic product per person is up over 60% since 1979, and our goal for the job market should not be simply to keep pace with where things stood nearly three decades ago. Higher levels of unionization and increasing the minimum wage would help, but they don't address the more basic need, which is to provide people with the necessary skills for the modern marketplace. The economy can expand and provide more good jobs as long as workers have the education and training required to succeed.

• Has Middle America Stagnated? Americans have experienced steady, gradual improvement in their standard of living since nearly the founding of the country. Each aging generation has regaled its children with nostalgic stories of difficult childhoods before the latest advances and income gains made life better. Even the Great Depression was only a temporary, though traumatic, pause in this progress—income per person was 50 percent higher by 1949 than it had been in 1929. Most Americans have long taken it for granted that their children's lives would be better than their own. Has this agreeable tradition come to an end? Numerous recent commentaries conclude that it has, at least for “middle America”—the broad swath of people who live well above poverty but well below opulence. But perhaps the past 30 years haven't really marked the end of two centuries of steady progress for average Americans. Statistics summarizing performance of the national economy tell a very different story. Gross domestic product per person, one of the mostly widely cited proxies for standard of living, has nearly doubled since 1975. Other measures of national economic performance, such as personal income, compensation of employees and the amount of goods and services consumed, have also risen substantially.

After smart weapons, smart soldiers Western armies will have to adapt if they are to overcome the odds that history suggests they are up against. Modern Western armies cannot, as the Romans did, make a wasteland and call it peace. Modern wars are complex affairs conducted “among the people” and, as Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British army, put it recently, “in the spotlight of the media and the shadow of international lawyers”. Such bewildering conflict is regarded by some military thinkers as the “fourth generation” of warfare, distinct from those of previous eras: the first generation, of line and column, which culminated with the Napoleonic wars; the second, of machinegun and artillery, which brought about the slaughter of the first world war; and the third, of manoeuvre with tanks and aircraft, which stretched from the second world war to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fourth-generation warfare, according to Thomas Hammes, a retired colonel in the American marines, involves loose networks, made more powerful and resilient by information technology. It does not seek to defeat the enemy's forces, but instead “directly attacks the minds of the enemy decision-makers to destroy the enemy's political will”. Such arguments are a hot topic at Western military colleges, especially in America. More has been written on counter-insurgency in the past four years than in the previous four decades. The study of small wars was largely abandoned by the United States army in the 1970s as commanders promised “no more Vietnams” and concentrated instead on how to defeat the massed Soviet armies.

Int’l Affairs

Dalai Lama Grabs Spotlight From China's Leaders Whether by coincidence or design, the U.S. Congress gave Tibet's spiritual leader its highest civilian award the same week China hosted its National Congress. President George W. Bush defied Chinese protests to become the first sitting U.S. president to appear in public with the Dalai Lama. China was not amused, particularly with Bush urging it to welcome back to Tibet the Nobel Prize winner who's lived in exile since 1959. Officials in Beijing said U.S. support for what they see as the Dalai Lama's ``splittist'' mission could have ``an extremely serious impact'' on U.S.-China relations. ``China is great at coming up with slogans -- lots of slogans,'' Michael Witt, a professor at business school Insead, said at an Oct. 19 conference in Singapore. ``It's not as good at explaining how it plans to implement its economic ideas.'' Hu, for example, is talking more and more about promoting a ``harmonious society'' and achieving it with something called a ``scientific outlook on development.'' To China watchers, that's a lofty way of saying narrow the gap between rich and poor in a way that doesn't worsen the nation's environmental challenge. Hu has offered few specifics on how to do it -- just slogans. The main headline coming out of Beijing is how Hu solidified his power and made way for younger leaders. Yet so far, Hu's been anything but a reformer -- he's been a status-quo-er. His plan seems to be to talk about change, while maintaining the status quos on China's currency, export-led growth, insatiable demand for resources and dual bubbles in stocks and pollution that are inflating further by the day.

China Curbs Imports From Asia as Korea, Malaysia, Singapore Lead Job LossThe U.S. isn't the only country watching jobs and manufacturing migrate to China. Increasingly, so are China's closest neighbors. The nation is reducing its reliance on imports from the rest of Asia as it makes more of the higher-value-added intermediate and capital goods it previously bought from abroad. That is threatening growth in countries whose export sales are already in danger of erosion from the U.S. slowdown. More than 13,500 electronics-product workers in Singapore have lost their jobs since 2004, according to Ministry of Manpower statistics. The International Monetary Fund last week forecast Singapore's growth rate will fall to 5.8 percent in 2008 from an estimated 7.5 percent this year and sees weaker expansion in the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea. ``China is moving up the supply chain,'' says T.J. Bond, chief Asia economist at Merrill Lynch & Co. in Hong Kong. ``The view that China produces labor-intensive goods but purchases high-value-added goods from abroad may be roughly correct today, but it need not last forever.''

China in the Year 2020: Three Political Scenarios Progressing toward the year 2020, China's political structure is unlikely to develop along a direct, linear trajectory. Just as China's rapid economic development and global integration shocked the world over the past two decades, so too might the country's future political course defy projected expectations. Three possible scenarios for 2020 are presented in this essay. Which road China ultimately takes will depend on the interplay of current political trends, key players in decisionmaking roles, and demographic factors that will be important in the future.

• China: Riding Two Horses at Once
• A Discussion on China (Video on Rose), Henry the K on China (Video)

Weak Mexican Peso Shows Oil Monopoly Undermining Growth, Reducing Surplus Mexican President Felipe Calderon is delivering a grim message: The largest oil producer in Latin America is running out of crude. The ban on private investment in its oil monopoly is depriving the nation of the benefits of record high prices and contributing to a slowdown in economic growth. Production of crude, Mexico's biggest export, has fallen 8 percent since 2004 to a seven-year low, data compiled by the government show. Mexico is being punished for its inefficiency in the foreign-exchange market. The peso fell 0.08 percent against the dollar this year, the worst performance among the 16 most-traded currencies. New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Credit Suisse Group in Zurich say the slump will deepen. The drop in production is hurting economic growth by reducing funds to improve highways, bridges and ports, Cervera said. Oil provides 40 percent of government revenue and the slowdown contributed to a 47 percent decline in the nation's surplus in August, according to the Finance Ministry. Mexico's economy has grown at an average annual pace of 2.8 percent since 2002, down from 4.4 percent during the previous five-year period. Output has dropped to a seven-year low of 3.12 million barrels a day as the state monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos fails to develop new reserves to offset dwindling production at Cantarell, the world's largest offshore field

• Just don't call it Plan Mexico A controversial scheme for American aid to help its southern neighbour fight drugs looks useful but underwhelming

The Price Of Suspicion. The French are more distrustful than almost any other nation. A pair of economists tallies the costs. According to surveys cited by the economists, Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc, the French more easily justify accepting or paying bribes, buying stolen goods or collecting state handouts they aren't entitled to. They are more distrustful of powerful institutions like the judiciary, Parliament and unions. And only 21 percent of the French "trust other people"—a statistic that puts France 24th out of 26 countries surveyed. Only Portugal and Turkey are more suspicious of their fellows. This wariness, they argue, manifests itself in virtually every sector of life, including employment and personal finance. Indeed, in their book, "La Soci?t? de D?fiance" ("The Society of Distrust"), Algan and Cahuc argue that this French "trust deficit … shackles the capacity to adapt, reform, and innovate." Distrust translates into a fear of competition itself—and the demand for protection generates a tangle of stifling legislation. They figure that if the French were as insouciant of others' intentions as the Swedes, the most trusting among nations surveyed, French unemployment, now at 8 percent, would be three percentage points lower. The nation's economy would be 5 percent larger, or €1,500 wealthier per person.

Russian Attacks on Foreigners Grow Along With Economy's Need for Workers As Russia's booming economy creates greater wealth and aspirations among its citizens, it is also forcing them to confront issues more familiar in the West: discrimination, harassment and even violence aimed at foreign workers like Kuram, who see economic opportunity in taking jobs Russians can't or won't do. A shrinking local workforce complicates matters, as oil- powered economic growth fuels demand for offices, apartments and shopping malls -- along with people to build and maintain them. Russian economic growth has averaged 6.7 percent a year since 1999. Meanwhile, Russia's population fell to 143.8 million in 2006 from 148.7 million in 1992 and continues to slide by almost 1 million a year, government statistics show. The workforce decline is dramatic. According to the Health and Social Development Ministry, it will drop 12 percent to 65.5 million by 2010 from 74.5 million now because of low fertility rates and the high number of alcohol-related deaths.

·         Welcome to Russian Consumer Democracy How are bloggers giving birth to a vigorous consumer democracy in Russia, of all places?

Common sense victorious The election returns more predictable politicians—and brings relief in Europe. THE era of the terrible twins is over. That is the upshot of the election on October 21st in which the ruling Law and Justice party, a populist and nationalist outfit, was swept aside by a more moderate and pro-European party, Civic Platform. On the highest turnout since the collapse of communism in 1989, almost 54% of Poles voted, including for the first time large numbers from the diaspora in western Europe. Civic Platform, under its leader, Donald Tusk (above), polled just over 41%, winning 209 seats in the 460-member lower house of parliament, an increase of 76 seats on the 2005 elections (see chart).

• Poland Wakes Up from a Bad Dream After the October 2007 elections, is Poland finally ready to stop tearing itself apart from the inside?Poland is a country with a difficult, often tragic, past. But at a rare moment in its history when it faced no threats from its larger and more powerful neighbors, Poland had to endure a modern-day tragedy perpetrated from the inside — by those at the highest levels of government. After the October 2007 elections, is Poland finally ready to stop tearing itself apart from the inside? At various stages over the past thousand years, Poland has found itself abused by neighboring Germany and Russia, which alternately — and sometimes even collectively — took advantage of their smaller neighbor. Another part of this unfortunate saga is that, at critical stages, Poland’s nobility was distinguished by being particularly undistinguished. Compared to their counterparts in other countries throughout Europe, they lacked a sense of national purpose and cohesion.

Economic Reckoning Looms in Argentina Cristina Kirchner's leftist bid to succeed her husband as Argentina's president could affect policy choices around Latin America, amid a split between free-market and populist economies. Argentina has often been a standard-bearer for economic trends in Latin America. In the 1990s, it was a leader in the wave of free-market capitalism that swept the region. That ended in a harrowing collapse in 2001. This decade, the Kirchner government has moved toward greater state control over the economy alongside several Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. With Latin America divided between those populist governments and countries pursuing free-market economics, the fate of Ms. Kirchner and Argentina could affect policy choices around the region. As Argentina's governing faction tries to prolong the country's roaring economic recovery -- and maintain its grip on power -- it is waging an increasingly desperate battle to contain inflation. The government's tainted figures put the annual figure at 8%, while most independent economists peg it around twice that high. Rather than cooling off the economy and fixing bottlenecks to future prosperity, Mr. Kirchner's government has been intervening in markets and prices with a heavy hand. The moves are often proving ineffective and sometimes sow distortions in the economy that could make lasting solutions even more difficult.

ME

Iran Seeks to Exploit U.S.-Turkish Tensions Over Kurdish Attacks From Iraq Iran may reap a political bonanza from increased tensions between Turkey and the U.S. sparked by Kurdish guerrilla attacks on Turkish forces near the border with Iraq. Iran's radical Islamic government, eager to expand its regional influence and resist U.S. efforts to isolate it, is wooing the Turks by showcasing its bombardment of the camps of Kurdish fighters along its border, according to experts on the region. The Iranians draw a pointed contrast between their willingness to act and what Turks see as a failure by the U.S. and its Iraqi partners to move against other Kurdish camps in northern Iraq.

IRAQ: Waiting For A Miracle To Show Up The sharp drop in violence (about 70 percent nationwide versus a year ago) is being seen as the result of the Sunni Arab terrorist organizations collapsing in defeat. Most of the Sunni Arab tribes have turned against the terrorists, and the al Qaeda organization, which is responsible for most of the suicide bomb attacks, has been torn apart. Most al Qaeda leaders are dead, captured or spending most of their time trying to avoid that fate. The system of safe houses and skilled technicians (bomb makers, trainers, supervisors) has been disrupted or destroyed. Before the Summer ended, it was possible to shift many American combat units to the battle against Shia warlords. There are two of these, both backed by Iran; the Badr Brigades, and the Mahdi Army. While Iranian backed, the two organizations are still Iraqi, and keen to see a strong and independent Iraq (run by a religious dictatorship, with one of the two warlords pulling strings behind the scenes.)

AFGHANISTAN: The Pushtun Civil War While the Taliban are seen as the major problem in Afghanistan, that is not really the case. The big problems are poppies, corruption and Pushtun tribal politics. All three of these combine to produce the Taliban. But to eliminate the Taliban, you have to destroy the highly profitable drug business, curb the corruption and deal with the Pushtun problem. None of these solutions are easy to implement.

MURPHY'S LAW: Pakistan Has a Plan, And It's Working The unrest in Afghanistan for the last three decades is mainly the result of unruly, and fractious Pushtun tribes living on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. There are about 40 million Pushtuns involved, belonging to about a hundred different tribes and major clans. Ethnically, the Pushtuns are related to the Iranians, and many speak a closely related language, usually as a second language. Like the Kurds (another group related to the Iranians), the Pushtun tribes never united long enough to establish a nation. Currently, 70 percent of Pushtuns live in Pakistan, where they comprise 15 percent of the population, while most of the remainder live in Afghanistan, where they make up 40 percent of the population. Thus the Pushtuns are a dominant force in Afghanistan, but a major nuisance in Pakistan. The Pakistanis have known, since the country was created in 1948, that they had to eventually take control of the Pushtun tribal territory, and gradually, since the 1950s, they have been doing that. Recently, the tribes have begun to notice. They are not happy with this creeping control. The Pushtuns have made their situation worse by allowing al Qaeda to hide out among them, forcing the Pakistani government so speed up their control program.

• Honour among them Thieves, murderers, rapists; and how the Pushtuns' ancient tribal code is fighting for survival against radical Islam

Politics and Policies

Rudy May Yet Hear an Amen From Values Voters Amid the booths pushing abstinence (``Pet Your Pet'' T-shirts), commandment-of-the-month bumper stickers and religious statues the size of aircraft carriers, the attendees at last weekend's Values Voters Summit are more open to heresy than I would have thought. As they hung out around the Starbucks kiosk outside the Washington Hilton ballroom, these evangelical Christians were willing to give former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani points just for showing up. It's not that he told them what they wanted to hear -- he didn't -- but that he wanted to be heard at all. With no one candidate grabbing a halo, the right is carefully leaving the door to Rudy ajar. They are willing to give outsized points for movement in their direction. Polls show that social issues are now secondary to many on the right, after national defense and someone who can beat a Democrat. Many know they are never going to win the war against abortion and gay marriage even with those politicians who promise they will do so. If they settle for a warrior instead, they might just find their way to Giuliani.

Do Candidates’ Health-Care Plans Make the Grade? In the din of presidential campaigns, the nitty-gritty of candidates’ proposals on important issues often gets overlooked. But National Journal is having none of that. The weekly trade magazine for the political class has assembled a panel of 10 experts, drawn from across the ideological spectrum, to study and grade the leading White House contenders’ ideas on health care. The newsweekly’s goal was to gauge each proposal on five key criteria — quality of care, government spending, consumer costs, employer-based insurance, and effect on the uninsured — while avoiding eliciting partisan views on whether a given plan was the best approach. Quality of care wasn’t a big issue during the last presidential campaign, but that has changed, says National Journal’s Marilyn Werber Serafini. On the panel’s scorecard, Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all won higher marks in this area than the three leading Republicans who have put forth health-care plans, but the GOP’s John McCain drew praise for “innovative approaches” to delivering health care. Republicans Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani and Sen. McCain predictably all fared slightly better in the judges’ assessments of who would fund reform with existing health-care dollars. But the Democrats nudged out all but Sen. McCain on whether the government would get its money’s worth from their respective proposals.

Consumers generally would see lower expenses under the Democrats’ plans, but the Clinton, Obama and Edwards campaigns do less than their GOP rivals to encourage patients to seek value for their money. The panelists found a similar partisan division on how the candidates’ plans would affect employers’ health-care costs. On extending health coverage to the uninsured, Democrats drew far higher scores than Republicans on an issue that Ms. Clinton and Messrs. Obama and Edwards have made a centerpiece of their campaigns. Still, the panelists complained that many elements of the proposals were vague, impractical or too costly.

Science and Culture

All systems go A powerful way of studying biology looks set for take-off. A central tenet of most scientific endeavour is the notion of reductionism—the idea that things can best be understood by reducing them to their smallest components. This turns out to be immensely useful in physics and chemistry, because the smallest components coming from a particle accelerator or a test tube behave individually in predictable ways. In biology, though, the idea has its limits. The Human Genome Project, for example, was a triumph of reductionism. But merely listing genes does not explain how they collaborate to build and run an organism. Nor do isolated cells or biological molecules give full insight into the causes and development of diseases that ravage whole organs or organisms. A complete understanding of biological processes means putting the bits back together again—and that is what systems biologists are trying to do, by using the results of a zillion analytical experiments to build software models that behave like parts of living organisms.The pharmaceutical industry stands to gain much from this approach. Around 40% of the compounds that drug companies test cause arrhythmia, a disturbance to the normal heart rate. Drugs such as the anti-inflammatory medicine Vioxx and the diabetes treatment Avandia have been linked with an increased risk of heart disease. The result is that billions have been wiped off their makers' share prices. Not surprisingly, the pharmaceutical industry has sought out Denis Noble of Oxford University, the creator of the beating-heart model, to help. Dr Noble is now part of a consortium involving four drug firms—Roche, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca—that is trying to unravel how new drugs may affect the heart. Virtual drugs are introduced into the model and researchers monitor the changes they cause just as if the medicines were being applied to a real heart. The production of some proteins increases while others are throttled back; these changes affect the flow of blood and electrical activity. The drugs can then be tweaked in order to boost the beneficial effects and reduce the harmful ones. Systems biology thus speeds up the drug-testing process.

Ulrike's Pickled Brain Yields Clues to Red Army Faction's Orgy of Killing All told, Red Army Faction violence between 1970 and 1993 left more than 60 people dead, including some 20 members of the group itself. A gruesome fascination with the gang lingers. Winkler, who writes for Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, understands the importance of context. The strength of his book lies in showing that terror didn't emerge in a vacuum. How did the street protests of middle-class students -- the children of dentists, historians, clergymen and lawyers -- degenerate into bank robberies and bloodshed? Consider Germany's Nazi past, Winkler says: The anger of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, expressed in outrage over the Vietnam War and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, originated in shame of their parents' complicity in the Holocaust, he argues. Only a handful of radicals made the leap of logic required to countenance armed revolt in a democracy. Che Guevara, Jean- Paul Sartre and the German-born philosopher Herbert Marcuse helped them cross that line, Winkler says. Marcuse and Sartre theorized that minorities had a right to defend their positions with violence. Che demonstrated how guerrilla warfare could foment revolution. The scope of this book is ambitious, presenting an alternative portrait of postwar Germany. Yet Winkler never falls into the trap of condoning terrorism. Born in 1957, he has enough distance from the generation that spawned the group to judge it, yet enough proximity to understand it.

Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man People of an age of peace, who cannot imagine that the world they enjoy could ever be overthrown, have a particular fascination with accounts of the violent fall of empires and the experiences of those who lived through the ruin of their good lives. Zhang Dai's life spanned the end of the Ming Dynasty in all its eccentric opulence, the subsequent trauma of the Manchu conquest, and the early decades of the Qing Dynasty, when many intellectuals of the old order tried to understand what had happened to the Ming Dynasty and why. Apart from a simple rise-and-fall narrative, the historical whole did not hang together any better than the late Ming polity did. Zhang Dai was, in Spence's terms, "a late Ming man," even though he lived almost half his life under the Qing. The late Ming lacked an effective "plot"; it could not mobilize its vast resources into some integrated plan whose effective implementation would be a narrative of the dynasty's survival. It was politically impotent in the face of Manchu armies, but still victorious in the retrospective imagination as a lost world of engrossing detail. It is easy to sympathize with the late Ming elite's cult of fascination with the individual and absorption in the particular, with its contempt for the conventional and its resistance to the totalizing state. The culture's values were the negative image of the Ming state's own egregious failures, most of all its inability to inspire a sense of collective enterprise and to support that enterprise. If the elite were absorbed in passions for their hobbies, they were also subjects of a dynasty one of whose recent emperors had given up all pretense of governing for cabinet-making. If they were given to theatrical absorption, one of their earlier emperors had decided to play the military hero and had created a state crisis by getting captured by the Mongols. Although it was only one of their multi-ethnic imperial roles, the new Qing rulers on the whole represented Han Chinese orthodox values far more effectively than their Ming predecessors. Perhaps the Manchu rulers, too, were only acting; but as with their armies, they were professionals.

Music, war and politics intertwined The turbulent years of the 20th century, as seen through its music. Awed by Berg, Gershwin hesitated at the piano one night, nervous about playing his catchy songs before one of the deconstructors of conventional harmony. Berg sternly encouraged him: “Mr Gershwin, music is music.” If only it were that simple, writes Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic, in his history of music in the 20th century. He notes that musical life in the past 100 years has “disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon.” The cultures may sometimes meet on affable terms, but the results can be comic in their incongruity. In the 1930s, when much of the European artistic elite was holed up in Hollywood, Fanny Brice, a comedienne, strolled over to Schoenberg at a dinner given by Harpo Marx: “C'mon, professor, play us a tune.” It would be hard to imagine a better guide to the maelstrom of recent music than Mr Ross, who worked on this book for a decade. He has an almost uncanny gift for putting music into words. No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording. And his reporter's nose and exhaustive research result in more telling vignettes and notable anecdotes per chapter than any reader has a right to expect.

Classical Music Fans Are Killing Classical Music Classical music is in danger of seeing its popularity shrink even further, and its most ardent supporters are to blame, says Richard Taruskin, a music historian and critic, in the New Republic. The genre’s fans, bloggers and musicians all tend to blame the downfall of classical music on a siege from the forces of pop culture, ignorance and commercialism. When commuters earlier this year passed by one of the world’s top violinists whom the Washington Post asked to play in a subway station, some classical-music bloggers assailed commuters for their supposed indifference to high art. Classical music’s defenders portray the genre as the last bastion of refined civilization, a view echoed in three books reviewed by Mr. Taruskin in the New Republic. Classical music is purely spiritual, and pop, purely commercial, the thinking goes. It is morally superior; it is the only musical form that can express the composer.

Mr. Taruskin says these are exaggerations and, worse, hurt classical music’s chances of success beyond music schools and subsidized concert halls. Classical supporters need to imagine ways the music can fit into pop culture and cultivate its commercial potential. Mr. Taruskin cites classical music’s varied use in movies as proof that it can thrive in contemporary culture. He also points to Sergei Prokofiev’s grandson, Gabriel, who composes electronic music, punk rock and string quartets. Instead of criticizing Washington, D.C., commuters who ignored a world-class violinist, classical fans should fault the decision to play near a busy station entrance, as opposed to the train platforms where savvy classical buskers have always made money.