The Rise and Fall of Nokia • 2018

72:05

This documentary travels through a world of joblessness, debt, and economic uncertainty to the sovereign nation of the plutocrats, where each crisis seems to offer a new business opportunity. In America, where the 2008 financial meltdown cost $4 trillion in economic output, fortunes were made by the very people who precipitated the disaster while millions lost their homes and their savings. Austerity in Europe, economic stagnation in Asia, a lost generation of the young and unemployed - signs we are living through a fundamental global reorganization, the result of which no-one can predict. The world of the 1% has arrived, and the wealth gap is now greater in many countries than during the Gilded Age, the era of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Vanderbilts. Can our stressed democracies deal with the fallout? Or have governments simply become instruments of the new elite?

2017 • Economics

54:52

Watch part two of The Power of Big Oil, a three-episode FRONTLINE docuseries investigating the fossil fuel industry’s history of casting doubt and delaying action on climate change. This part chronicles how, as scientific evidence of human-caused climate change mounted in the 2000s, the industry continued to question the science, and went to new lengths to shape American politics and stall climate policy.

S1E2 • The Power of Big Oil • 2022 • Economics

58:28

In the first of this three-part series investigating consumer spending, Jacques reveals how the concept of 'product lifespan' holds the key to our ever-churning consumerism. Exploring the historical origin of planned obsolescence, when some of the world biggest electrical manufacturers formed a light bulb cartel in the 1920s, Jacques reveals how products that are essential to our modern lifestyles are still made to break. During his investigation, Jacques uncovers the process by which a crucial transformation happened and attitudes towards spending were transformed. Instead of needing new goods because our old ones were broken, we learned to want them for reasons of fashion and aspiration - awaking a consumer appetite that could never be satisfied. In the US, he visits a recycling centre where brand-new high-tech goods are destroyed before they have even come out of the box. Jacques also meets some of the companies that encourage consumers to be dissatisfied with what they have and encourage purchases as part of an ever-faster cycle of 'upgrades'. He asks a senior IKEA executive why, despite the company's commitment to sustainability, it still encourages repeated discarding and purchasing. Jacques also talks to a former senior Apple employee who reveals how the company's new focus on fashion, with its colourful iPhones, keeps us buying even when technological innovation slows.

S1E1 • The Men Who Made Us Spend • 2014 • Economics

48:03

Indonesia is one of the most volcanically active countries in the world--the island of Java alone has 45 active volcanoes, which could erupt at any time. Descend into some of the world's most volatile craters with scientist Tom Pfeiffer, who is hell-bent on photographing rare volcanic phenomenon.

S2E3 • Volcanic Odysseys • 2016 • Economics

59:01

Wayne Pacelle, President of the Humane Society of the United States, draws a practical roadmap for how we can use the marketplace to promote the welfare of all living creatures, and how industries, innovators and consumers are coming together in this powerful social movement.

S1E6 • Curiosity Retreats: 2016 Lectures • 2016 • Economics

58:54

Once upon a time there was a large Finnish company that manufactured the world's best and most innovative mobile phones. Nokia's annual budget was larger than that of the government of Finland and everyone who worked there shared in the windfall. But global domination cost the company its pioneering spirit and quantity gradually took over from quality, with new phone models being churned out by the dozen. Market share eroded, until in 2016, mobile phone production in Finland ceased. The Rise and Fall of Nokia is a wry morality tale for our times, told by those that lived and worked through the rollercoaster years in a company that dominated a nation.

2018 • Economics