Commanding Heights: The Battle For The World Economy

Directors:Greg Barker | William Cran
Writer:Greg Barker
Release Date:2002 (USA)
Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy is a book by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, first published as The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World in 1998. In 2002, it was turned into a documentary of the same title, and later released on DVD.

As the 20th century drew to its close and our new century began, the battle over the world economy intensified.

Some people feared globalization and questioned the benefits.
0thers welcomed it.
Millions of people today are better off than they would've been without those trends and developments, without globalization, and very few people have been harmed by them.
When the terrible events of September 11 seemed likely to drive the world deeper into a recession, new questions emerged about the perils of the new world economy.
How can our now deeply interconnected world cope with a global downturn, and rise above other crises? And is global terrorism the dark side of the promise of globalization? You can't get away from the fact that globalization makes us interdependent.
So it's not an option to shed it.
So is it going to be, on balance, positive or negative? This is the story of how the new global economy was born, a century-long battle as to which would control the commanding heights of the world's economies: governments or markets; the story of intellectual combat over which economic system would truly benefit mankind; the story of epic political struggles to implant those ideas on the nations of the world.
Part of what's happened is a capitalist revolution.
At the end of the 20th century, the market economy, the capitalist system, became the only model for the vast majority of the world.
This economic revolution has defined the wealth and fate of nations and will determine the future of the planet.
This new world economy is being driven by technological change and by political change, but none of it would have happened without a revolution in ideas.

Commanding Heights: The Battle For The World Economy - The Battle of Ideas (1 of 48)