TV Review: Commanding Heights
Commanding Heights is a PBS video series that I really ought to say more about than I'm going to. It spans six hours. I watched the first five while I worked out and treadmilled back in December, but then it languished until I finished the last hour today. It's readily and freely available on YouTube:
Part 1: The Battle of Ideas
Part 2: The Agony of Reform
Part 3: The New Rules of the Game
Is it any good? Well ... I would not say it is entertaining, but it is educational. Don't watch it expecting to be given the answers to how society should be structured and wealth distributed. It's not about that.
Part 1: The Battle of Ideas starts with the turn of the 20th century and goes over the evolution of economic theory, practice, and ideology. It discusses the major economic events that happened in different countries as illustrations of these theories - test cases, if you will. You see, early on there was an idea that a state-controlled economy was best, setting prices and making everyone obey the rules. But eventually it was decided that capitalism worked better - letting the market (or rather, the aggregate of everyone) decide on prices.
This free-form system was difficult for most state-run countries to implement, hence the name of the Part 2: The Agony of Reform. Reform was never a smooth road. Some countries made fast transitions to free markets. Some crashed and burned. Some flirted with free market and then backslid (like Russia). There was a lot here that made for an informative history lesson for me. Things I'd dimly remembered from the 80s - trouble in Central America, for example - were laid out more clearly and the economic causes described. The rise and fall of governments, the debates over US aid, all made sense now.
In Part 3: The New Rules of the Game, they talked about globalization. No longer is it just one country doing its own thing, good or bad. Now countries are interconnected. We have things like the US giving aid and stuff to Central American countries and influencing their financial policies (as well as who is in charge). People from country A are investing in businesses in country B and this can have a big effect on the economy of both. Similarly, when the people in one place lose faith in the industry and profit-generating ability of the people they've invested in, their lack of faith can cause a contagious withdrawal of funds, which can devastate the place that loses it. They gave a lot of details of the late 90s Asian collapses.
They gave me background for the intermittent protests going on against the 'powers that be', the whole Occupy Movement and where it came from. It started in the late 90s as US labor unions trying to block globalization. They educated massive numbers of people on how the various world trade organizations, world bank, etc. were shifting money in ways that developed the second and third world nations, which sometimes/often/could? result in losing US union jobs. They trucked these people in to the summits and trained them to be protestors. Once the unions had a seat at the table, more or less, they didn't have a need for the protestors. But that didn't mean the protestors went away.
The movement morphed to being about social justice and egalitarianism, to being about equality. But one thing they illustrated pretty well in the show was that capitalism causes inequality. The creation of wealth is unequal. We can either all be equally poor, or we can suffer through having some people be better or luckier accumulators of wealth than the rest of us. It gave me a very different point of view about the 1%, though I'm still not a fan of transgenerational wealth distribution.
If you're in an Economics class, this is a great refresher of basic concepts and how they've played out in the real world. If you're not, it's still a good refresher on what happened when and why. The series stops at the events of 9/11 and does a good job of showing how it's an outgrowth of economic disorder. I'd love to strongly recommend it, but it's six hours long and it's boring. You need to know that.
Part 1: The Battle of Ideas
Part 2: The Agony of Reform
Part 3: The New Rules of the Game
Is it any good? Well ... I would not say it is entertaining, but it is educational. Don't watch it expecting to be given the answers to how society should be structured and wealth distributed. It's not about that.
Part 1: The Battle of Ideas starts with the turn of the 20th century and goes over the evolution of economic theory, practice, and ideology. It discusses the major economic events that happened in different countries as illustrations of these theories - test cases, if you will. You see, early on there was an idea that a state-controlled economy was best, setting prices and making everyone obey the rules. But eventually it was decided that capitalism worked better - letting the market (or rather, the aggregate of everyone) decide on prices.
This free-form system was difficult for most state-run countries to implement, hence the name of the Part 2: The Agony of Reform. Reform was never a smooth road. Some countries made fast transitions to free markets. Some crashed and burned. Some flirted with free market and then backslid (like Russia). There was a lot here that made for an informative history lesson for me. Things I'd dimly remembered from the 80s - trouble in Central America, for example - were laid out more clearly and the economic causes described. The rise and fall of governments, the debates over US aid, all made sense now.
In Part 3: The New Rules of the Game, they talked about globalization. No longer is it just one country doing its own thing, good or bad. Now countries are interconnected. We have things like the US giving aid and stuff to Central American countries and influencing their financial policies (as well as who is in charge). People from country A are investing in businesses in country B and this can have a big effect on the economy of both. Similarly, when the people in one place lose faith in the industry and profit-generating ability of the people they've invested in, their lack of faith can cause a contagious withdrawal of funds, which can devastate the place that loses it. They gave a lot of details of the late 90s Asian collapses.
They gave me background for the intermittent protests going on against the 'powers that be', the whole Occupy Movement and where it came from. It started in the late 90s as US labor unions trying to block globalization. They educated massive numbers of people on how the various world trade organizations, world bank, etc. were shifting money in ways that developed the second and third world nations, which sometimes/often/could? result in losing US union jobs. They trucked these people in to the summits and trained them to be protestors. Once the unions had a seat at the table, more or less, they didn't have a need for the protestors. But that didn't mean the protestors went away.
The movement morphed to being about social justice and egalitarianism, to being about equality. But one thing they illustrated pretty well in the show was that capitalism causes inequality. The creation of wealth is unequal. We can either all be equally poor, or we can suffer through having some people be better or luckier accumulators of wealth than the rest of us. It gave me a very different point of view about the 1%, though I'm still not a fan of transgenerational wealth distribution.
If you're in an Economics class, this is a great refresher of basic concepts and how they've played out in the real world. If you're not, it's still a good refresher on what happened when and why. The series stops at the events of 9/11 and does a good job of showing how it's an outgrowth of economic disorder. I'd love to strongly recommend it, but it's six hours long and it's boring. You need to know that.