Chrystia Freeland

DAVOS, Switzerland–George Soros is a traitor to his class. That’s not an insult or a tabloid exaggeration. It is, instead, a direct quote from my conversation with the billionaire investor and philanthropist at the World Economic Forum here.

‘‘I am a traitor to my class,’’ Soros said. ‘‘I think that the income differentials are too wide and ought to be narrowed,’’ he added, which is why he favors a bigger hit on those, like himself, at the very top.

But among his plutocratic peers, he said, that is very much a minority opinion. In fact, Soros, who helped spearhead the muscular Wall Street support for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, particularly among hedge fund and private equity investors, believes the president’s call for higher taxes is the reason he has been ditched by the financiers: ‘‘That has led my hedge fund community to abandon Obama in favor of any Republican, because they don’t like to be taxed.’’

Henry Blodget, a former (and formerly disgraced) Wall Street analyst who has been resurrected as one of the smartest writers on business and politics, agrees that the financial class is strongly attached to its tax breaks. After his Wall Street friends have had a few drinks, he said, ‘‘they are cackling that they have fooled everybody into thinking that there’s some justification for this.’’ ‘‘This’’ is the carried interest tax provision, which allows some private equity and hedge fund managers to pay tax at 15 percent.

But the cackling may be coming to an end — and the hostility toward the president mounting — following his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. A centerpiece of that address, and most likely a central theme on the campaign trail over the next nine months, was Obama’s insistence that the 1 percent must pay up.

‘‘Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households,’’ Obama said, in an oblique attack on the carried interest tax break and on Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent on income of $21.6 million in 2010.

‘‘Tax reform should follow the Buffett Rule,’’ the president said. ‘‘If you make more than a million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.’’ And, like Soros, the president has decided not to duck charges of class war: ‘‘Now you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.’’

And not just Americans. Davos is all about identifying the common challenges the global business community faces. One of the big ones this year is governments reining in their plutocrats in the most painful possible place — their bank accounts. In Britain, for example, the week began with proposals from Vince Cable, the business secretary, on how to bring down salaries for top executives.

‘‘We cannot continue to see chief executives’ pay rising at 13 percent a year while the performance of companies on the stock exchange languishes well behind,’’ Cable told Parliament on Monday. ‘‘And we can’t accept top pay rising at five times the rate of average workers’ pay as it did last year.’’ Chilling words for the City, especially since Cable serves in the cabinet of a Conservative prime minister.

Another one of the annual tropes at Davos is an emphasis on the softer side of business. This is a time of year for chief executives to wax poetic about their companies’ initiatives to educate the rural poor in India or provide clean water in Africa. But alongside these carefully crafted tales of corporate social responsibility, there is plenty of grumbling about government overreach. Three and a half years after the 2008 financial crisis, a particularly popular notion is the idea that the pendulum of financial regulation has swung too far, endangering not just the banking sector, but the sluggish economic recovery more generally.

There is also a powerful sense that businesspeople are being blamed for structural issues that aren’t their fault. One British executive told me it was wrong to criticize executives for their high salaries. Those were the fault of their boards and compensation committees: ‘‘The CEO,’’ the executive said, ‘‘really has no say.’’

In a similar vein, the private equity chief David M. Rubenstein, who served in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, said during a panel discussion that businesspeople like Mitt Romney shouldn’t be blamed for paying low taxes — that’s the government’s fault. ‘‘You change the law, and they’ll pay the taxes,’’ said Rubenstein, a co-founder and managing director of the Carlyle Group. ‘‘Romney said — and I’m not his defender — he’s paying whatever the law required. If you change the law, change the law. But don’t criticize him for paying the taxes that the law requires him to pay.’’

There’s some truth to that argument. After all, even Warren Buffett, the inspiration for Obama’s Buffett Rule, and the class traitor Soros today pay only those taxes required of them. Their point, as Soros told me, is that the tax rate should be higher. But of himself and Buffett, he added, ‘‘the Republicans are trying to save us from taxation — against our will.’’

Yet the Rubenstein defense goes only so far. The low tax rates for millionaires are neither a natural law nor an act of God. They are the result of a political process that, since the late 1970s, has pushed rates, particularly at the top, hugely downward. Business has been instrumental in that shift, both as a matter of general ideology and in fighting doggedly and skillfully for sector-specific tax breaks, like the carried interest provision.

It is pleasant to spend a few days in snowy Davos eating fondue, skiing and talking up creative examples of social entrepreneurship. It can even be fun to muse on one of the big questions the World Economic Forum has designated for collective cogitation: how to ‘‘redesign’’ capitalism.

But the hard part is embracing higher taxes or a lower salary. ‘‘I personally believe that when it comes to policy, you shouldn’t be pursuing self-interest but the public interest,’’ Soros said. But Davos Man prefers to believe in a world of ‘‘kumbaya’’ capitalism, where self-interest and the public interest would coincide. Openly insisting that this is not always the case is how Soros really has betrayed his class.

Watch George Soros tell Chrystia why he thinks it will take years for Germany to realize that Europe needs additional stimulus and why he would be loading up on Italian government bonds if he were still an active investor.

Watch as the billionaire investor tells Chrystia why the hedge fund community has abandoned President Obama and why there’s not a huge gap between the views of the president and Republican front-runner Mitt Romney.

Among old Russia hands, the smart thing to say about Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the billionaire who is running for president, is that he is a puppet of the Kremlin. He’s not a real opposition politician, the argument goes, he is merely a liberal-sounding insider who has been given Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s blessing to compete to make the race look more legitimate and to split the liberal vote.

All of this is true. But when I interviewed Prokhorov in Moscow a few days ago, I realized that it missed the most important point — what Prokhorov’s candidacy, and the man himself, tells us about the battle raging today inside the Russian governing elite.

When people take to the streets to challenge their regimes, particularly in societies that had been dismissed as apathetic, the most exciting story is the protesters. Many of them are fresh faces, and they can be painted in the idealistic colors of the outsider.

The opposition is certainly important — and it usually also has the virtue of being right. But the fate of the protest movement is very often decided not on the raucous streets where the opposition marches, but in the grim offices where the governing establishment decides how it will respond and how it can hang on to the loot it acquired while in power.

That was the case in the Soviet Union 20 years ago, when three career Communist Party officials gathered in a hunting resort in Belarus to sign the death warrant of the regime that created them. It was true of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which was led by a man who had served as prime minister and central bank chief for the president he was defying. And it was decisive last year in Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak lost the support of the military.

Prokhorov’s decision to run in the presidential election in March is, in the words of the man himself, a sign that the Russian elite, too, is seriously divided.

Prokhorov made no bones about being a political neophyte and a candidate of the elite. “It’s not easy to pass all the barriers,” he said, referring to the intentionally onerous criteria a candidate must meet to contest the presidency. “You need to have more or less a green light to pass to the ballot.”

When I asked if he meant a green light from the Kremlin, Prokhorov insisted that politics at the top were more complicated. “It’s more difficult,” he said. “You need to have a green light from a majority of the Russian elite.”

But that elite, Prokhorov said, is not monolithic: “The Kremlin is not, like, one person or two people — there are wings, liberal wings and conservative wings. It’s an ongoing fight between them. This is the nature of Russia right now, that even within the parties, within the government, in the Kremlin, we have these wings. So it is a fight between the liberal and conservative wings: What is the future of Russia.”

Prokhorov said the conservative wing was “very cynical.” “They need stability at any price. And they are ready to pay any price, even instead of future development,” he said. “They are afraid of competition, they are afraid of development.”

But the liberals are ascendant: “I think that the liberal part of the elite is bigger and bigger from day to day, because I have a lot of calls from different levels, and they really express their support for my candidacy.”

These establishment liberals, of whom Prokhorov is very much one, believe “the era of managed democracy is over.” As Prokhorov said, “We now have all the pieces in place to move very fast to being a real democratic country.”

But Prokhorov wants that shift to happen by consensus within the elite. When I asked him if an Orange Revolution could happen in Russia, he was aghast.

“I am against any revolution, because I know the history of Russia. Every time we have a revolution, it was a very bloody period,” he said. “So I like very fast evolution.”

That evolution should be achieved, he believes, by a deal within the governing elite: “We need to sit at the table — the liberal wing and conservative wing. We need to sit together, to speak in a very open way, and make a decision — what is the future of Russia.”

To the leaders of the Russian protest movement, this vision of a cozy, elite-driven evolution is wishful thinking at best. Grigory Chkhartishvili, a best-selling Russian novelist who writes under the pen name Boris Akunin, predicted this week that Putin would be forced out of power in March.

But even if, as in Cairo last year or Kiev in 2004, the street ultimately does triumph, the elite battles Prokhorov embodies remain critically important.

Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and opposition leader, told me these internal divisions were a reason to hope that the Kremlin did not have the stomach for severe repression.

“This option is taken very seriously in the Kremlin,” Kasparov said. “But it is all about the balance of power within the ruling elite, because now they all understand, if Putin goes, maybe 10, 15, maybe 20 percent of those who are surrounding him and making this core of the elite, they will be facing trial; they can lose money. But most of them — 80 percent at least, maybe more — will be making deals with the new government. Maybe giving up some money, but securing their fortunes. If they go into oppressive mode, then the numbers will change and any revolutionary explosion will blow them up.”

If it comes to a choice between hanging on to political power or hanging on to at least some of their Swiss bank accounts, Kasparov is betting that 80 percent of the elite will be prepared to do a deal. Prokhorov’s political debut could be a very important sign that Kasparov is right.

As you may have heard, Chrystia has a new talk show on YouTube called the Freeland File. Each week, Chrystia and her guest roster of marquee policymakers, business leaders and thinkers will be providing commentary and analysis that illuminate the world’s most pressing issues.

Thanks to a Christmas miracle, Chrystia’s Russian visa arrived in time for her to travel to Moscow and interview Mikhail Prokhorov for the Freeland File’s debut episode. In the three clips below, watch as the Russian billionaire and presidential candidate tells Chrystia why he would be a better leader than Vladimir Putin; how his political career started with his 2007 arrest over a prostitution ring in France; and what he plans to do with his NBA team if he wins the election in March.

The Internet is, of course, old hat. We are all getting used to social media, too — your grandmother probably has a Facebook account, and every CEO worth his salt, along with all the world’s would-be revolutionaries, is on Twitter. Mobile, once the new thing, is now taken for granted as part of the world’s hardware. In 2010, more than 4 billion people, or 60 percent of the world’s population, were using mobile phones. Twelve percent of them were smartphones, whose presence is increasing more than 20 percent a year.

But don’t get complacent. A new wave of the technology revolution is cresting and, like its predecessors, will again change the way we work and live. This latest transformation is being called “big data” — a term for the vast amount of digital data we now create and have an increasing ability to store and manipulate.

If wonks were fashionistas, big data would be this season’s hot new color. When I interviewed him before a university audience a few weeks ago, Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary, named big data as one of the three ideas he was most excited about (the others were biology and the rise of the emerging markets). The McKinsey Global Institute, the management consultancy’s research arm and the closest the corporate world comes to having an ivory tower, published a 143-page report last year on big data, trumpeting it as “the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity.”

To understand how much data is now at our fingertips, consider a few striking facts from the McKinsey report. One is that it costs less than $600 to buy a disk drive with the capacity to store all of the world’s music. Another is that in 2010 people around the world collectively stored more than 6 exabytes of new data on devices like PCs and notebook computers; each exabyte contains more than 4,000 times the information stored in the Library of Congress.

McKinsey believes that the transformative power of all of this data will amount to a fifth wave in the technology revolution, building on the first four: the mainframe era; the PC era; the Internet and Web 1.0 era; and most recently, the mobile and Web 2.0 era.

Like the four previous stages of the technology revolution, McKinsey predicts big data will lead to a surge in productivity. In the U.S. retail sector alone, for example, the consultants calculate that big data could increase a retailer’s operating margin more than 60 percent.

Those improvements are an almost unalloyed good for the consumer — who doesn’t like Amazon’s recommendations or Walmart’s low prices, two innovations facilitated by pioneering use of big data?

But, as with the rest of the technology revolution, big data is likely to have a more mixed impact on us in our role as workers. David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done groundbreaking research on the “polarizing” effect of technology on the labor market: his bottom line is that it has been good for people at the top and not had much of an effect on people doing hands-on jobs at the bottom. But it has hollowed out what used to be the middle. Studying the same phenomenon in the United Kingdom, the economists Maarten Goos and Alan Manning have come up with an evocative term for what is happening — the division of work into “lousy and lovely jobs.”

The lovely jobs are why we should all enroll our children immediately in statistics courses. Big data can only be unlocked by shamans with tremendous mathematical aptitude and training. McKinsey estimates that by 2018 in the United States alone, there will be a shortfall of between 140,000 and 190,000 such graduates with “deep analytical talent.” If you are one of them, you will surely have a “lovely” job, and one that is well-paying to boot.

The work of Autor, Goos and Manning on the impact of the technology revolution so far shows that it has eroded what used to be the middle class by replacing a lot of white-collar and relatively well-paid blue-collar jobs — a travel agent, for example, or many factory positions — with computers and robots. What’s left are the “lousy” jobs — washing floors or wiping tables — that can’t be outsourced or automated.

That trend will surely be exacerbated by big data. Some of those improved margins in the retail sector, for instance, will come from what McKinsey delicately terms “the optimization of labor inputs.” That’s another way of saying that if you use big data to track your sales more precisely, you need fewer salespeople. That’s good news for us as customers, but bad news if you need a job.

This division of the world into lovely and lousy jobs is a pressing political problem. Big data will make it worse. The good news is that it might also offer a partial solution. McKinsey argues that big data could make both healthcare and the provision of government services cheaper and more effective. As an example, it points to the German Federal Labor Agency, a vast bureaucracy with 120,000 employees. Big data techniques helped it to save around €10 billion, or $12.7 billion, in recent years.

This hints at what is the truly revolutionary potential of big data. Inevitably, this latest wave of the technology revolution — like its four predecessors — will transform our lives as consumers and as workers. But so far the technology revolution has lagged in its impact on us as citizens. If our governments can begin to close that gap, then, as societies, we might just have a chance to bridge the growing divide between lousy and lovely jobs.

2011 was a good year for protest and a bad year for government. 2012 will be a good year for both if our political leaders can figure out the connection.

Across the globe, this was a year when people took to the streets, often overthrowing their leaders in the process. That was true in the Arab world, in Russia, in India, in Western Europe, in the United States and even in China.

And everywhere, this year of mass defiance wrong-footed those who were supposed to be in the know. The experts had thought the Arabs were getting richer and were too scared of their autocrats, that the Russians were apathetic and quite liked their neo-czar, that the Indian middle class was politically disengaged, that West Europeans were too old for outrage, that Americans didn’t care about the class divide and that the Chinese comrades were too effective at suppressing dissent.

But everywhere, the conventional wisdom was turned upside down by people who turned out to be angrier than their elites had suspected, and better able to channel that dissatisfaction into mass protest and even revolution.

The first surprise was the strength and near universality of the public discontent. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, the motivations of protesters in each country were unique. But there was a common thread to the uprisings and a common reason why the elites were taken by surprise.

The unifying complaint is crony capitalism. That’s a broad term, to be sure, and its bloody Libyan manifestation bears little resemblance to complaints about the Troubled Asset Relief Program in the United States or allegations of corrupt auctions for telecommunications licenses in India. But the notion that the rules of the economic game are rigged to benefit the elites at the expense of the middle class has had remarkable resonance this year around the world and across the political spectrum. Could the failure of the experts to anticipate this anger be connected to the fact that the analysts are usually part of the 1 percent, or at least the 10 percent, at the top?

The second surprise was how easy it has become to transform mass dissatisfaction into mass protest. That was true both in chillingly repressive regimes and in ones where the hurdle to collective action had been thought to be public apathy.

The answer to this puzzle is obvious today — the communications revolution, ranging from satellite television to Twitter to camera phones, has made it easier than ever before to organize protests and to keep them going once they start.

What’s important to remember in hindsight is that one of the most provocative ideas of late 2010 — published just two months before a Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, posted his suicide note on his Facebook Wall, and three months before the Egyptian government blocked Twitter in an effort to muzzle its people — was Malcolm Gladwell’s characteristically iconoclastic assertion that, as the subhead to his October 2010 New Yorker essay put it, “the revolution will not be tweeted.”

At least in public, Gladwell is sticking to his guns, but not too many other people are. In one informed example, consider a recent public interview I conducted with Naguib Sawiris, the Egyptian telecommunications billionaire and liberal politician who backed the Tahrir Square demonstrations.

When I asked him about the Gladwell theory, Sawiris first wondered, “Is he here in the room? Do I have to be polite?” and then went on to explain his criticism: “He has no clue what this technology has done to my part of the world. Ninety percent of the success of this revolution is attributed to it.” The point isn’t to mock the brilliant Gladwell — it is to recall that as late as the autumn of 2010 the impact of the technology revolution on civil society, particularly outside the developed West, was still very much an open question.

So much for the success of the rebels. Inside the citadel of the state, by contrast, 2011 was a veritable annus horribilus. That was especially true for some pretty vile dictators. But even in democracies, government didn’t seem to work very well. Political paralysis was a routine complaint in the world’s richest democracy, and in its biggest democracy; it was the diagnosis in presidential systems and in parliamentary ones. Right-wing governing parties were accused of dysfunction — and so were governments on the left. Some central bankers were attacked for printing too much money; others were criticized for doing too little.

The success of the protesters and the dysfunction of government are the flip sides of one another. They are related in an obvious way — people take to the streets when they think their leaders are doing a poor job. But the widely perceived failure of the state around the world is connected to the effectiveness of the protests in deeper ways, too.

Let’s start with the technological tools that made protesting so much easier. They may have made governing tougher –informed and empowered individuals are probably harder to boss around than ignorant, isolated ones. More important, though, social activists have embraced the technology revolution more effectively than governments have. The revolution is being tweeted, but government isn’t. It’s time for the state to catch up — and hopefully not by emulating the Chinese comrades with their cybercensorship expertise.

As for crony capitalism, this slogan of the street is both a challenge for the state and an opportunity. For some regimes, of course, crony capitalism, with a side order of repression, is the only dish on the menu. For them, the trends of 2011 do not bode well.

But most of today’s troubled market democracies don’t need a revolution to sweep away their cronies. What they do need is a new version of capitalism, designed for the 21st century. That is what the world’s protesters, in their different ways, are all asking for. Here’s hoping that 2012 provides some politicians with some answers.

Who knew Swedish finance could be so sexy? The late, great Stieg Larsson’s best-selling The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — the Hollywood version hit North American theaters this week — was the first to tap into a hitherto undiscovered global fascination with Nordic number crunching.

Following gingerly in his footsteps, I’d like to report on a fascinating discussion at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington this month, where the Scandinavian story was center stage.

The conference, where I moderated a panel, was organized by the European Corporate Governance Institute and Columbia Law School. The theme was the involvement of shareholders in the companies they own.

Americans like to think of themselves as the world’s archcapitalists, especially compared to Europeans, whose fondness for a social safety net often earns the label, applied on this side of the Atlantic as an insult, of ”socialist.” That’s why the message from many of the speakers at the SEC discussion, particularly the visitors from Europe, would come as a surprise on Main Street, USA.

The United States, they argued, has created a system of capitalism without capitalists, of private sector companies whose owners have abdicated responsibility for the companies that belong to them.

“In the U.S., you can more or less do whatever you want, without having the support of the owners,” Mats Andersson, the chief executive officer of the Fourth Swedish National Pension Fund and a speaker at the conference, told me in an interview afterwards. “Because of the composition of the boards in Sweden, the company’s big decisions all have to be based on a mandate or the support of the owners.”

”Who is actually responsible for executive remuneration in U.S. companies?” Andersson said. ”If I could decide on my own salary, I would certainly love that system.”

In Andersson’s view, greater shareholder involvement is good both because it is right and because it works. ”If you put your money at risk, you should have influence,” he said. ”Capitalism without owners doesn’t work.”

Andersson’s biggest worry about companies without engaged owners is that they fall victim to the tyranny of short-term stock-market expectations or the self-interest of their executives, rather than building for the future.

”We are long-term investors. The point is to increase our returns, so we need to be active and engaged,” Andersson told me. ”The next quarter is pretty much irrelevant. We are interested in building a good company that will perform long term.”

Andersson isn’t alone. Earlier this year, Dominic Barton, global managing director of McKinsey, the management consultancy, got the business world talking with an essay in the Harvard Business Review titled ‘‘Capitalism for the Long Term.”

Barton’s point was that the current sickness of global capitalism wasn’t some passing infection, caused by the financial crisis and susceptible to a natural cure. Instead, he argued, capitalism, especially in the West, needed a ”deep reform” that would shift it from ”quarterly capitalism” to ”long-term capitalism.” One of the culprits Barton identified was ”the ills stemming from dispersed and disengaged ownership.”

A Canadian who now lives in London, Barton has spent much of his career working in Asia — in fact, he was in India when I reached him on a fuzzy cellphone line this week. He told me that one of the most striking differences he has observed between the rising economies of Asia and of other emerging markets like Brazil compared to the United States is their owner-dominated long- term capitalism, versus the quarterly capitalism of the United States, with its widely held public companies.

”Thinking about where the company should be in 10 or 12 years, these are not the discussions held in many widely held companies,” Barton said.

The irony is that directly engaged owners are the men who made American capitalism great and who remain responsible for its most outstanding companies. In his 1890 masterwork, Principles of Economics, Alfred Marshall, the seminal English economist, bemoaned the feebleness of the staid British joint-stock company, compared to an America dominated by owner-entrepreneurs: ”The area of America is so large and its condition so changeful, that the slow and steady going management of a great joint-stock company on the English plan is at a disadvantage in competition with the vigorous and original scheming, the rapid and resolute force of a small group of wealthy capitalists, who are willing and able to apply their own resources in great undertakings.”

More than a century later, the American companies the world most admires — Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook — are the creations of that same breed of rapid and resolute founding owners.

Things get more complicated when companies go public and the founder retires or moves up to St. Peter’s boardroom. Many European countries, including Sweden, get around that problem by keeping things in the family, with the founders’ descendants retaining a significant ownership stake and voice in the family firm.

That tradition doesn’t sit so well with Americans, whose country was, after all, created in part in rejection of the hereditary principle.

”Why do U.S. families retreat from corporate control? They don’t seem to be very dynastic,” Marco Becht, a professor, the executive director of the European Corporate Governance Institute and one of the organizers of the SEC. conference, mused to me when I called to discuss the issue. ”If people care so much about having owners who care about the company, maybe the U.S. and the U.K. have the wrong type of owners,” he said. ”The logical conclusion is if you want long-term owners who care, you have to bring back the families.”

This has been a bad year for dictators, starting with the Arab Spring and ending now with the Russian Winter. If you are one of the autocrats who survived the annus horribilis of 2011, here are three lessons, drawn from some smart Russians and Russia-watchers, of what the unexpected Slavic protests this month could mean.

The first is that authoritarian regimes don’t run on autopilot. To survive, particularly in the age of the Internet, jet travel and global capital flows, dictatorships need to be savvy and effective. We often attribute the success of democratic revolutions to their brave leaders or the spirit of the times, but, as Lucan Way, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, argues, “authoritarian incompetence” can be an equally powerful driver.

That is certainly the case in Russia, where one reason United Russia, the party of power led by Vladimir V. Putin, did so poorly in elections this month is the simple fact that the regime made a lot of political mistakes.

“The ineffectiveness and stupid actions of the authorities have accelerated the process,” Grigory Chkhartishvili, the best-selling Moscow author who writes under the pen name Boris Akunin, explained in an e-mail. He recalled asking Yegor Gaidar, the late architect of Russian economic changes, “when does he expect society to awaken. Around 2015, he answered, if they, meaning Putin and his entourage, do not make too many mistakes. Well, they have made too many mistakes.”

Vladimir Gelman, a professor of political science at the European University in St. Petersburg, made a similar point this week. Gelman argued that the Kremlin’s wobble in December was an own-goal, or, as he put it, “a blow delivered with its own hands.”

The biggest mistake, in Gelman’s view, was “the attempt to mask Russian authoritarianism with a liberal facade.” That turns out to have been an error partly because “part of the political class and concerned members of civil society actually believed in the liberalization of the regime.”

But the bigger problem was that Russia’s authoritarian leaders became so infatuated with their political Potemkin village they neglected some of the coercive basics: focused as they were on the carrot, the authorities didn’t pay enough attention to the stick. Gelman contrasts this political season, when the government’s attitude before the election was “peaceful,” with the 2007-8 political cycle, when the opposition was repressed in advance and the state’s political machinery was fully engaged.

The standout example of authoritarian competence, by contrast, is China, whose rulers have continued to focus relentlessly on doing whatever it takes to stay in power. That determination was in evidence after the “color revolutions” in the former Soviet Union, which prompted a thoughtful and concerted effort to tighten government control, as did the uprisings in the Arab world this year.

The second lesson of the Russian protests is one that will be particularly worrying for China. It is that economic success does not guarantee political success. This equation is mystifying in Western democracies — where people tend to believe that “it’s the economy, stupid,” and usually they’re right.

That’s why the International Monetary Fund, which focused on Egypt’s healthy gross domestic product numbers, was wrong-footed by the protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo. And it is why the demonstrations in Russia perplexed many foreign observers, who noted that many of their participants were well-heeled members of a middle class that prospered in the Putin era.

A partial explanation of this puzzle is that, as in Tunisia and Egypt, middle-class citizens in a dictatorship can be moved to protest by their souls, not just their pocketbooks. The refrain during the Arab Spring was that the protests were about dignity. As for Russia, Chkhartishvili put it another way: “This is not about bread, this is about cleanliness. It’s not political, it’s hygienic.”

Research by Carol Graham and Stefano Pettinato suggests another reason why a prospering society might still be a rebellious one. In work that initially focused on Russia and Peru, the two identified a group they described as “frustrated achievers,” people who had become both richer and less happy.

“Frustrated achievers are people who are just out of poverty or the lower middle class,” Graham, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said. “They are people who have made relatively large gains, but they report being very frustrated.”

A source of that frustration, Graham said, was when “the gains around them are much bigger than their own, and bigger than they can ever achieve in their lifetime.” Post-Soviet Russia, with its oligarchs, crony capitalism and corruption, is a petri dish for frustrated achievers.

The third lesson of the Russian Winter is one it has in common with the Arab Spring. One consequence of the rise of social media is the emergence of what Way calls “leaderless protests.”

“In Russia, as in the Arab world, protests started largely spontaneously without the participation or instigation of the major opposition groupings,” Way said in an e-mail. “Instead, they were inspired by actors who came out of nowhere and lacked virtually any kind of organizational backing.”

But this new world is also hard to manage for the would-be revolutionaries. Twitter and Facebook may make it easy to get those frustrated achievers onto the streets. But the really hard work always starts the day after the revolution, and if you didn’t need to build a protest movement in the first place, you may soon lose power to the people who did.

All the doubting Thomases who wondered whether Occupy Wall Street would have lasting political impact got their answer this week in Osawatomie, Kansas. That’s where President Barack Obama traveled to deliver a speech that is being billed as the mission statement for his 2012 re-election campaign.

The president chose that town of fewer than 5,000 people, 50 miles, or 80 kilometers, southwest of Kansas City, for its historical resonance — it is where Theodore Roosevelt journeyed just over a century earlier to give his seminal “New Nationalism” address.

But Zuccotti Park in New York, the informal epicenter of the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement, served as an equally important, albeit less explicit, inspiration. The movement’s accomplishment is to have legitimized discussion of rising income inequality in the United States — Obama described it as “the defining issue of our time.” That is a landmark declaration.

For one thing, in recent decades the participants in the national political discourse have been queasy about addressing issues of class and distribution directly. One of the intellectual victories of the Reagan Revolution was to make it feel practically un-American to talk about how the pie was divided. The culturally acceptable, win-win question to ask was how to make that pie grow.

Obama’s speech represents an important shift for another reason, too. As recently as this summer, when the headline battle was over the debt ceiling, the issue driving the political debate was government spending and how to cut it.

But today, thanks in great part to Occupy Wall Street (to which the president alluded directly just once), talking explicitly about the 1 percent and the 99 percent is not just O.K., it seems to be a way a man presiding over an economy with 8.6 percent unemployment thinks he can be re-elected.

The speech was written for the campaign trail, in direct and sometimes emotive language, but one of its most impressive qualities was its honesty and sophistication. The surge in income inequality, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else, is driven by a complicated and connected set of causes that are being fiercely dissected and debated in the growing academic literature.

On the left, the preferred culprit is political — the argument that the 1 percent have amassed their fortunes by capturing the political process and thereby securing lower taxes and more favorable, generally weaker, regulation.

Obama did not shy away from those factors, but his core explanation was politically less convenient and intellectually more persuasive. As the president sees it, the big drivers are the twin revolutions reshaping the world economy — globalization and new technology: “Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world.”

He compared the creative destruction of today’s economic transformation with the Industrial Revolution. The “massive inequality and exploitation” of that transformation spurred Roosevelt to action, just as income inequality today should be at the top of the national agenda.

Framing the woes of the 99 percent as the consequence of a massive — and broadly positive — economic transformation was a brave political choice. Pinning it all on the banksters, as they were called by the left during the Great Depression, would make for more powerful rhetoric and delight the Democratic base. Moreover, the potential downside of alienating Wall Street is something this White House has done already.

But Obama’s speech understated two facts that follow from his chosen explanation, and unless the president is able to confront them, his administration’s response to the problem he so accurately defined will fall short.

The first is the grim economic reality that the hollowing out of the U.S. middle class will be very hard to reverse. One reason the bankster explanation is so appealing (unless, of course, you are one of them) is that it has a simple remedy — raise taxes and tighten regulation. But if you believe, as Obama does, that a larger and largely welcome economic transition is also at work, figuring out how to rescue its victims becomes a more daunting challenge.

To understand the scale of the problems the Western middle class faces, consider how it looked to a few Indian business leaders I recently spoke to in Mumbai.

“You know, historically, economic activities tend to migrate because people who don’t have it have a lot more urge to have it, they’re willing to work harder for less money, and that’s part of life, O.K.?” B.N. Kalyani, the chairman of Bharat Forge, India’s largest exporter of motor parts, told me. “You had your golden period, now, hopefully, we’ll have ours.”

S. Gopalakrishnan, the co-chairman of Infosys, the pioneering Indian outsourcing company, told me bluntly that the per capita consumption of the Western middle class would have to decline as the developed and developing worlds “meet somewhere in the middle.”

Even if you had the lion heart of a Roosevelt, that is not a political platform you would want to run on.

The second consequence of the president’s chosen explanation is political. As is his wont, Obama took great pains to unite rather than divide: “Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.”

But it might not be quite that easy. As Obama explained, some people are benefiting greatly from the transformation of the world economy — he shared the jaw-dropping facts that the average annual income of the top one-hundredth of the 1 percent is $27 million, and that the typical C.E.O. makes 110 times more than his typical worker. The president wants to believe that “all will benefit” from the vision of America he articulated. But if the problem you are trying to fix is a winner-take-all society, it may take more than rousing rhetoric to persuade the winners to back your plan.