Commanding Heights: The Battle For The World Economy

Skidelsky: Keynes was the real inventor of macroeconomics.
Concepts we take for granted today, like gross domestic product, the level of unemployment, the rate of inflation- all to do with general features of the economy- were invented by him.
Harcourt: He was writing a book which he thought would revolutionize the way we thought about economic systems.
BPut it would also give us the means to make sure they operated better.
Skidelsky: It was written against the background of not only the collapse of the world economy, but the potential collapse of democratic government.
Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933.
Democracy seemed to be losing ground, and, with democracy, the system of liberty.

So Keynes had to produce an answer to the Great Depression, or democracy would be swamped by totalitarianism.
Narrator: The new American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was staring economic disaster in the face.
His wife, Eleanor, described Inauguration Day as "very, very solemn, and a little terrifying." Roosevelt: This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.
Narrator: Roosevelt's voice of confidence rallied the nation.
He then embarked on a whirlwind program of reform.
Yergin: For Roosevelt and the New Deal, it was a war.
They were at war with the Great Depression.
And they responded with frenetic activity, relief programs for the unemployed, for the hungry.
Programs to get people back to work.
They built dams and highways and national parks.
At the same time, they instituted a program of regulating capitalism in a way that had never been done before in order to protect people from what they saw as the recklessness of the unfettered market.
Narrator: Privately, Roosevelt feared the market system had failed.
So he created an entire alphabet of new agencies to regulate banks, the stock market, capitalism itself.

Commanding Heights: The Battle For The World Economy - The Battle of Ideas (11 of 48)