TELEVISION
Free
Free markets with no commercials
Commanding Heights does for capitalism what Ken Burns' films did for jazz and the Civil War. If you can overlook the irony of a paean to free markets that was made by a government-funded PBS affiliate and partially underwritten by Enron, you're in for six hours of quality edutainment.
This sweeping economic history of the 20th century, based on Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw's book of the same name, examines the evolving role of government in the marketplace. Compared with the source text - which appeared in early 1998, when it was easier to trust in the benevolence of the invisible hand of the marketplace - the three-part documentary is more guarded. Yet the central insights hold up despite the return of rising unemployment, budget deficits, and the post-September 11, post-Enron appreciation for government. This is largely because Yergin and Stanislaw avoid easy dichotomies between statism and laissez-faire economics. Likewise, they refuse to conclude whether the current state of affairs represents the end of history or simply the latest swing of the pendulum.
The series is lively and engaging, with incisive commentary from economists like Milton Friedman and Paul Volcker, as well as from statesmen like Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Mexican president Vicente Fox. It is dexterous enough to first touch on the interventionist theories of John Maynard Keynes, then celebrate Margaret Thatcher's ambitious program of industrial privatization and the rollbacks of the welfare state in Britain. Finally, it turns a lens on the new economy. The explosive success of Microsoft's free (yet barely profitable) Hotmail service and Infosys Technologies' emergence on the Nasdaq (a first for any Indian company) exemplify the promise of a future fueled by innovation and increasing global interdependence.
Free markets without commercial interruptions ... who could ask for anything more?
April 3, 10, and 17 on PBS: www.pbs.org/commandingheights.
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