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VIDEO

The Commanding Heights: The Battle For The World Economy

Producer: PBS
Recording Date: 2003
Source: PBS

(from Amazon.com): The history and impact of the new global economy are made clear--and compelling--in Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. 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. Part 1, 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. Part 2, 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 3, The New Rules of the Game, explores the consequences of globalization, including terrorism and the contagion of market collapse. The series makes good use of both large- and small-scale examples, and features interviews with several major world leaders. There is a slight teenybopper feel to The Battle for the World's Economy's admiration for today's celebrity economists, but the contagious enthusiasm is part of what makes the series so interesting. Big ideas are made extremely accessible to the average viewer (without condescension). Well worth watching. --Ali Davis

Product Description
Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy confronts head-on Americans' critical concerns about the new interconnected world. Based on the best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, this groundbreaking series explores our changing world—the great debate over globalization and the future of our society.
Commanding Heights reunites the team that created The Prize— award-winning producer William Cran (From Jesus to Christ) and Daniel Yergin—and is the first in-depth documentary to tell the inside story of our new global economy and what it means for individuals around the world. Filmed on five continents, the powerful narrative combines stunning film footage with dramatic stories and extraordinary interviews with world leaders and thinkers from twenty different countries, including: Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, Mexican President Vicente Fox, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, Rep. Richard Gephardt, and President George W. Bush's Economic Advisor Lawrence Lindsey.

Commanding Heights dramatically captures the issues that have defined the wealth and fate of nations and shows how the battle over the world economy will shape our lives in the twenty-first century.

Special DVD Features Include:

  • Access to the Commanding Heights Web site, including:
    • An exclusive time map, which provides an interactive atlas of economic history
    • Comprehensive transcripts from on-camera interviews, and biographies of the people who played significant roles in the development of the modern global market
    • An online teacher’s guide that provides suggestions for applications of the Web site in classroom instruction
    • An excerpt from the companion book to the series
    • A complete list of interview subjects included in the series
  • Chapter breaks
  • English audiotrack and subtitles
  • On three DVD5 discs.
     
Lee Trepanier on Dec 16, 2008

This is an excellent introduction to political economy for undergraduate students. The three DVDs also has a book that can accompany it, but the DVDS are sufficient for students. In fact, one of the best features of the DVDs is that the professor can skip certain sections of the documentary when the material is not relevant to the class or when he is pressed for time.

The first DVD, the Battle of Ideas, contrasts the ideas of Keynes and Hayek. I usually skip the sections that deal with Britain (chapters 13, 15, 17-18) and India (chapter 10). Hayek's Road to Serfdom is an excellent text to assign when students are viewing this DVD.

The second DVD, the Agony of Reform, traces the difficulties that India, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Russia underwent in their transition to a free market or semi-free market economy. I usually select only the chapters that focus Latin America and Russia as successful and unsuccessful case studies of states transitioning to a capitalist economy.

The third DVD, the New Rules of the Game, focuses on globalization: NAFTA, global financial markets and meltdowns, the rise of Asia, etc. Again, I only select chapters of themes that I want to focus on in class and leave others aside.

One of the problems with the documentary is its datedness - it ends essentially at 2000, thereby ignoring such issues as the energy and environmental policies. It also assumes a basic knowledge of foreign countries, which most American freshman lack. Nonetheless, the documentary does an excellent job of showing how "ideas have consequences" in both the political and economic arenas.