need to finish
students recommend
PBS video series available too ( )

A book of two parts (literally).

The first part is purely informative, about how the titans of the world economies (power, heavy Industry, the huge specialist Industrial sectors in those countries that have / had them) developed in the world's various economies. The general idea is that as industries grew their needs changed.

The second part is more of a cheerleading for giving away these national assets to the nearest rich person and opposing the "explosion of (human) rights" so annoying to the small-minded 1%. Lots of obvious mistakes and tenuous connections here - hence this book''s bad reputation.

Wanted to give 5 stars, but couldn't. ( )

The Commanding Heights is a book about the control of the economic policies of nations. It goes into discussions about Communism and Socialism and other forms of Market Planning and goes over what happened to them. It is actually quite fascinating and interesting since it reminded me of a lot of World Events that I lived through but was too young to care about.

There isn’t much else to say, except that the book is a bit dated since it was printed in 1998. ( )

Full disclosure: I've owned the book since first semester of grad school and have read certain chapters for use in papers and such, and I also own and have watched several times the PBS-produced DVDs that excellently tell the story (you can too at the link). But, I'd never read the entire book all the way through.

This book is the most comprehensive story of the neoliberal revolution ever written. It explains the post-WWII transition to state-run economies and top-down development to the much more free market oriented neoliberal revolution that started with the end of the 1970s, and the book goes through 2002.

Scott Sumner calls these events an "underreported phenomenon" in an essay he wrote recently, which reads as sort of a brief summary of this book (which I don't know that he's read).

I don't know that it's "underreported" so much as it seems to have been forgotten in the wake of the Great Recession and the backlash against capitalism, and what people perceive to be "market failures" that are really just consequences of unmitigated greed.

Billions of people in China, India, SE Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere have risen from stark poverty to a much more empowered lifestyle because of their governments' embrace of freer markets. Governments all over the world used to own everything from train lines to nightclubs to grocery stores, but eventually re-figured out that those would be better run privately. Modern-day Greece is a perfect example of where near statism gets you-- 25% of Greece's population had a lifetime-guaranteed government job going into their EU-mandated fiscal austerity plan. Governments, including the U.S., used to commonly set wages and prices which led to shortages , surpluses, and poverty.

If you want the (mostly) complete story, read Commanding Heights. The appendices alone are great for reference. I recently used the book to refute a fairly well-known liberal blogger's view that "there are zero historical examples of conservatives mobilizing to make the deficit smaller." The young liberal pundit class apparently don't remember anything further back than 15 years and never leave the country. And they parse things in simple terms: "How'd that free market thing work out for Mexico and Bolivia?" ignoring rampant government intervention in those economies or poor monetary policy, or other things that are vitally important.

If Commanding Heights has one obvious flaw, it's at the conclusion of its chapter on Russia. On one page it notes that the new freedoms that Russians enjoy, including freedoms of the press, can never be rolled back. Then, on the next page, it paints a dark uncertain picture where those freedoms are indeed rolled back by Putin & co. Perhaps this is the result of bad editing in a revision?

If you want the most complete picture of world economics from 1945-2002, read Commanding Heights. If you want a view of some of the guiding principles of that neoliberal revolution, read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, or Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, or just watch Milton Friedman's Free to Choose series. If you want a more on-the-ground view of how the neoliberal revolution looked in the 1990s, read Tom Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree or The World is Flat. If you want to read a critique of much of the above, read Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents. ( )

The authors flap the illusion of a "movement" from state control to "market consensus". [399] Published in 1999, the authors are oblivious to the signs of takeover of the world by pirates who fund a constant noise of destabilization and hostility to all governments, regardless of the type. The authors proclaim the "shift" of public services to "private corporations" without showing a single example of this providing a benefit to the community. They do document the dramatic increase of profiteering prisons, security forces, and "schools"--the "core" functions of government. [366] They accept, without any basis for doing so, the illusion that "local control" will benefit citizens, when in fact economic fiefdoms are formed (seized) for the benefit of local monopolists.

The authors document the fact that after publishing his "outstanding work"--The Constitution of Liberty--which was praised by Keynes, Hayek fell into depression, tried repeatedly to abandon his "supporters" in Chicago, and took an appointment at the University of Freiburg, amid the Ordoliberals. [144] While his followers continue to misread him, the bottom line is that Hayek's most important theme remains this: "Laissez-faire does not work. Government has a clear and required role to ensure the development, protection and maintenance of the institutions without which a competitive market cannot endure: Laws and regulation, and recourse for the victims of those who commit crimes and steal wealth from the "free market" using force and fraud. [144] ( )