Even if you have no interest in business, Commanding Heights is still fascinating to watch. It is amazing how many topics are covered in little time, yet, the pace does not seem rushed.
Commanding heights episode 3 summary series#
The pacing of the series is also excellent. The series travels to the locations where events happened, and in many cases, interviews the people who made them happen, from Bill Clinton to Milton Friedman to workers in various countries. Commanding Heights shows that it is people who create the ideas, it is people who accept or reject them, it is people who profit or suffer by them. This is not an economics lesson this is high drama that impacts peoples lives. The brilliance here, and there is much, is how clearly, thoroughly, and excitingly the stories are told.
Part 3 addresses the current and future problems of a globalized world. Part 2 shows the impact, sometimes painful, of moving to market economies. Part 1 shows how the world moved from market economies to planned economies and back to market economies in a century. It does so in three-two hour installments. The subject of Commanding Heights is the globalization of world trade in the 20th century. Yet it does deliver a rational argument, despite being incomplete, about the whole discussion that does dominate a lot of contemporary political debate. However, its rightward tilt slightly unnerved me. I'm giving this documentary 7 out of 10 because its technical quality and depth with the amount of information and many interviews. We all know now that Cheney is not exactly someone who really has altruistic instincts as his core beliefs. It is amazingly interesting to look back at this film after the failures of the Bush administration and watch Richard Cheney say that few people have been harmed in the process of globalisation.
There are many issues left untouched in this documentary. However, my advise is get out and read, get out and discover. A good basis for knowledge for beginners about globalisation. However, I am well versed in this topic, and my reading does not extend to Naomi Klein and Michael Moore, but the problems and difficulties that accompany globalisation are not really even hinted at in this documentary. The usual arguments of pulling several people out of poverty, and the industrialisation of the developing world are constantly reiterated to imply, cleverly, that globalisation is an irreversible and beneficial process to everyone. Few dissenting opinions are detailed or extensively dealt with. However, the skew in favour of the process of globalisation is all too evident. The many interviews with Sachs, Clinton, Cheney, de Soto and numerous Heads of State or former Heads of State from Asia and Europe. There was much here that I did not know before. PBS has really tried hard to give an extensive depiction of the development of globalization since the war. The miracles of Hayek-style solutions is portrayed with little counterbalancing examples of its negative sides. France, Germany, Scandinavia and Japan all continued to follow certain Keynesian parameters. What isn't mentioned is that several other western powers did not embrace the market-solutions of the USA and UK. This documentary shows, truthfully, how Keynesian economics was discredited and replaced in the Western Economies after the turbulent decade of the 1970s. The cycles that have been depicted here in Part 1 are continuous and the "Austrian School" cycle is in its last days, in my humble opinion. With the fall of Lehmann Brothers, Bear Stearns, Chrysler, GM and the precarious situation of many other large conglomerates the hypotheses have been discredited slightly that have been presented here.
Commanding heights episode 3 summary for free#
This documentary was made at a time obviously before the obvious nadir for free market economics of this year, 2008. Part Three, ‘The New Rules of the Game’, explores the consequences of globalization, including terrorism and the contagion of market collapse.Globalization is a polarizing topic. Part Two, ‘The Agony of Reform’, explores the upheavals that such deregulation caused, focusing primarily on economic growth and gains and touching briefly on the wrenching consequences for the poor. Part One, ‘The Battle of Ideas’, chronicles the history of economic thought from the start of the 20th century and its socialist reforms right through the deregulation of the 1980s.
This three-part, six-hour documentary does an astonishingly thorough job of dissecting and explaining macroeconomics and their current political and social importance without ever causing a loss of consciousness for the viewer. The history and impact of the new global economy are made clear – and compelling – in ‘Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy’.
0 kommentar(er)
