Book Description

The Pulitzer Prize-wimming author of The Prize joins a leading expert on the global economy to present an incisive narrative of the risks and opportunities that are emerging as the balance of power shifts around the world between governments and markets -- and the battle over globalization comes front and center. The Commanding Heights is essential for understanding the struggle over the "new rules of the game" for the twenty-first century.

Amazon.com

The "commanding heights," according to Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Yergin and international business advisor Joseph Stanislaw, are those dominant enterprises and industries that form the high economic ground in nations around the globe. In their analysis of the new world economy, The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World, they examine "the individuals, the ideas, the conflicts, and the turning points" that are responsible. And by considering events such as the ongoing Asian monetary crisis, they suggest what the ultimate interconnection of financial markets might mean in the future.

The Wall Street Journal, Kenneth Minogue

Daniel 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 New York Times Book Review, Jeffrey E. Garten

It 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.

From Booklist

Yergin and Stanislaw's global tour d'horizon doesn't extrapolate from the discrediting of various shades of socialism that free markets are here to stay. The situation varies from country to country. The authors report on the post^-World War II performance of significant national economies and, moreover, on the politicians who, starting with Margaret Thatcher, advocated the disengagement of the state from the economy. This work complements Robert Skidelsky's Road from Serfdom (1996), a readable analysis of how the predictions of free-market economist F. A. Hayek came true. The authors supplement their research with interviews of influential economists and politicians over the past two decades, such as those who implemented "shock therapies" in ex-communist countries. The authors' judgments are reasoned and seasoned, far from podium-pounding homilies on the free market; rather, they explain why the welfare state was so appealing after the war, then how it gradually sputtered into 1970s stagflation. Renders wide-ranging acquaintance with the basic ideas of contemporary economics.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Gilbert Taylor

Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Robert Heilbroner

...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.

Commentary, Gary Rosen

Yergin 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.

Book Dimension :

length: (cm)23.4 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)15.5