Session 7: The Battle for the World Economy Episode Three  The New Rules of the Game. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights.

Reading Assignments:  

Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights. Video Transcript Three; Preparatory Readings: Frederick Engels (1880) "Utopian Socialism," "Dialectics" and "Historical Materialism" Karl Marx & Frederick Engels (1848) "The Communist Manifesto" p. 1-21.

Session Seven Topics:

By the early 1990s, most of the world had converted to free-market capitalism, setting the stage for the rapid growth of a new global economy. Rapidly falling trade barriers and unrestricted capital flows fueled by furious technological innovation and a new global workforce would all combine to transform the world economy.  

"The New Rules of the Game" examines the promise and perils of globalization in the 1990s, focusing on the story of President Bill Clinton's embrace of free-trade policies, the challenges the world's leaders faced in taming the virulent contagion of financial collapse in the developing world, and the violent debate over globalization that suddenly surfaced in the Seattle protests.  

In a story that moves from the 1992 presidential campaign to the September 11 attack on America, this film confronts a series of issues: the impact of free trade on the developing world and on American workers; the perils of financial contagion when problems in one developing country cause investors to pull their capital out of all emerging economies; and the challenge of inclusiveness -- bringing the world's poor into the era of global growth. It cuts through the rhetoric to show what "globalization" really is, and what it will mean for our lives in the 21st century.

Discussion Questions 

1.   What caused the collapse of the first age of the global free market (in 1914)?

2.   What has a century taught us about the specific problems of market economies -- speculative "bubbles," crashes, underemployment, and unequal distribution of wealth?

3.   Compare the benefits and risks in re-privatizing state-owned industries.

4.   Is there a relationship between open markets and political freedom?

5.   What happens when national governments restrict their domestic economies from open participation in (and dependence on) foreign trade?

Class Sessions