The Commanding Heights: the Battle Between Government & the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern

...a book that must be read by anyone who responds to its powerful subtitle.... It has been a long time since I have read a book in which intelligence and readability were so felicitously mixed. -- Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Robert HeilbronerDaniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw write clearly and have the journalist's talent for fixing personalities in our minds with biographical detail. No one could ask for a better account of the world's political and economic destiny since World War II. -- The Wall Street Journal, Kenneth MinogueGary Becker Winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, 1992 An absorbing, well-written narrative of the victory of market forces over communism and socialism. The authors effectively and dramatically show how ideas and events combined to produce the most important economic revolution of the second half of this century. -- ReviewIt is an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, combining the history of milestone events in countries as diverse as France and India, the biography of leaders as different as Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping and the evolution of ideas ranging from Keynesian economics ... to the Chicago school of free markets. But it is also a brilliantly successful project, a colorful and even suspenseful story of how the world has been transformed over the last half-century. -- The New York Times Book Review, Jeffrey E. GartenYergin and Stanislaw trace the course of our century's enchantment with central planning from its first hopeful postwar expressions to its dissolution in recent decades under the relentless pressure of the marketplace and its partisans. It is a grand tale, and they relate it with admirable ambition and energy, even if in the end they fail to do it full justice. They rightly consider Hayek the leading thinker in the revolt against statism. The problem with Yergin and Stanislaw's presentation of his views is that it scants their essential aspect, which is political and legal. As they would have it, the confrontation between market and state basically concerns information, that is, which side knows more. For Hayek himself, however, the overriding reason state control of economies is "the road to serfdom" is that it vastly expands the opportunities for the governing class to serve its own narrow interests. Such messily political matters are not fundamental to Yergin and Stanislaw's account. This no doubt explains their strange insistence that the state may soon come roaring back to reclaim its place atop the commanding heights. Whatever misfortunes may befall the newly liberalized economies of the world, however, far too many people have learned that political power, even when exercised in the name of public-spirited economic ends, corrupts in direct proportion to the ambition of its reach. -- Commentary, Gary Rosen--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.