Yergin attributes the origin of the phrase commanding heights to a speech by Vladimir Lenin referring to the control of perceived key segments of a national economy.

The authors define globalization as periods in which free markets predominate and countries place few, if any, limits on exports, immigration, imports, or information exchanges.

After World War II, the authors note that the work of economist John Maynard Keynes came to be widely accepted in Western economies.

While Thatcher, Reagan, and their successors made sweeping reforms, the authors argue that the current era of globalization finally began around 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

More specifically, they believe that if inequality in economic growth remains high and if Third World nations are not offered the proper opportunities and incentives to support capitalism, the movement will end just as the first era did.

The authors place so much emphasis on narrowing economic gaps because they believe, contrary to many of the people who are interviewed, that there is no ideological support for capitalism, only the pragmatic fact that the system works better than any other, as they remark: The market also requires something else: legitimacy.

Yet a system that takes the pursuit of self-interest and profit as its guiding light does not necessarily satisfy the yearning in the human soul for belief and some higher meaning beyond materialism.

Few people would die with the words "free markets" on their lips.In the book, the authors examine briefly many different nations and regions and their economic development since World War II.

The robber barons were often condemned in the press, but the United States had much more commitment to industrialization and free markets than did other countries in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.

However, during the 1970s, stagflation was brought on by the 1973 oil crisis and the shift from the gold standard to fiat currency, which discredited the policy consensus that was set in place by the New Deal Coalition.

However, the Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, came to power in force after the 1945 general election and was dedicated to government controls to prevent another economic crisis.

However, during the 1970s, massive strikes by unions (see the Three-Day Week and Winter of Discontent) and other economic woes, such as the 1973 oil crisis, almost ground the British economy to a halt.

Lenin responded with the New Economic Policy, a program that allowed limited capitalistic activity, which resulted in what he would call state capitalism, and the economy began to improve.

When he lifted the Brezhnev Doctrine and allowed Poland's Solidarity to usurp that country's communist regime, the entire Warsaw Pact collapsed, soon followed by the Soviet Union itself.

Unlike Mahatma Gandhi, who supported a village-centric economy, after India's independence in 1947, its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, promoted industrialization.

The free-marketer Singh was appointed prime minister when his party won the elections in 2004 although he was not the victorious United Progressive Alliance's stated candidate, and the general expectation was that Sonia Gandhi would take the seat.

Chile became an experiment in free markets when Augusto Pinochet called in followers of Friedman to evaluate the economy, the so-called Chicago boys.

During the 1980s, economist Jeffrey Sachs was sent as a consultant and new President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada reined in inflation in the 1990s by severely cutting government spending.

The authors argue that Africa's economic development was severely hindered by central planning, socialist ideas, and political dictatorships that promoted warfare and other conflicts.

Poland's free-market reforms pushed by Solidarity and Lech Wałęsa were initially mixed and criticized by its citizens, but by the late 1990s, the Polish economy was doing much better than other former communist states in the Eastern Bloc.

Venture Capitalist Tim Draper appears in the third episode and speaks about his success at the time with Hotmail for email and other early internet investments.

This was many years before Draper would go on to invest in many other successful tech companies of the 2000's, including Tesla, Coinbase, and even a large purchase of Bitcoin from a sale of the cryptocurrency after the fall of the Silk Road after 2013.