Here is a question that has bothered me for a while and I am surprised that nobody else seems to have asked it before: How comes Western countries had the better orchestras (collectives) and the Soviet Union the better classical music soloists during the Cold War? Would one not expect the contrary?

In 1905, Max Weber, in his masterpiece, “The Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism”, proposed an interesting hypothesis which claimed that Protestantism, Calvinism, and Puritan ethics influenced the development of capitalism.