In 1998, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw published The Commanding Heights -a tour de horizon of the transformation of the relationship between governments and the economy between 1979 and the end of the 1990s. The book covered the end of communism in the former Soviet bloc, the transformation of the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping, and the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions in the United States and the UK. In describing changes in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, the book described the rise and fall of the post-Great Depression version of the mixed economy. The changes wrought in these countries beginning in 1979 occurred because events in the 1970s undermined the intellectual supports for both the centrally planned system of Soviet-style communism and the government intervention in the social democratic European countries as well as in the United States under the post-New Deal mixed economy. These events gave credence to the ideas of opponents of both systems, for example, the economist Freidrich Hayek. The emerging dominant ideology that they describe is one of free market laissez -faire economics-an ideology that they believe triumphed as a result of the failures of the more interventionist systems.
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