Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy

Season 12002

The people, ideas, and events that created our current world economy.

3 Episodes

E01 The Battle of Ideas

A global economy, energized by technological change and unprecedented flows of people and money, collapses in the wake of a terrorist attack .... The year is 1914. Worldwide war results, exhausting the resources of the great powers and convincing many that the economic system itself is to blame. From the ashes of the catastrophe, an intellectual and political struggle ignites between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace, each determined to reinvent the world's economic order. For more than half a century the battle of ideas will rage. From the totalitarian socialist systems to the fascist states, from the independent nations of the developing world to the mixed economies of Europe and the regulated capitalism of the United States.

April 3, 2002

E02 The Agony of Reform

As the 1980s begin and the Cold War grinds on, the existing world order appears firmly in place. Yet beneath the surface powerful currents are carving away at the economic foundations. Western democracies still struggle with deficits and inflation, while communism hides the failure of its command economy behind a facade of military might. Worldwide, the strategies of government planning are failing to produce their intended results. As the command economies totter and collapse, privatization transfers economic power back into entrepreneurial hands, and whole societies go through wrenching change.

April 10, 2002

E03 The New Rules of the Game

With communism discredited, more and more nations harness their fortunes to the global free-market. China, Southeast Asia, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America all compete to attract the developed world's investment capital, and tariff barriers fall. In the United States Republican and Democratic administrations both embrace unfettered globalization over the objections of organized labor. But as new technology and ideas drive profound economic change, unforeseen events unfold.

April 17, 2002

Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy

E01 The Battle of Ideas

E02 The Agony of Reform

E03 The New Rules of the Game

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Under the Dome

Stranger Things

The Walking Dead

Breaking Bad

Twin Peaks

Squid Game

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Chernobyl

Game of Thrones

Two and a Half Men

Shadow and Bone

Lost

The Sopranos

The Mandalorian

Spartacus

Loki

You

Fallout

Star Wars: Andor

E01 The Battle of Ideas

E02 The Agony of Reform

E03 The New Rules of the Game