Billion Dollar Deals

Updated Thursday 28th September 2017

This series is the story of how our world was changed by people we’ve never heard of, transforming our lives without us realising it had even happened.

Read more about the series on the BBC's programme pages, or explore the themes covered in the series below.

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About the TV series

Read more about the three episodes in the series.
Investigate technology

Take our quiz to find out how much you know about how technology is changing our lives.

Health

What if the way we understand our world is wrong? What if it isn’t politicians that shape the way we live our day to day lives, but secret business deals? Deals made in secret: high up in a boardroom, on a golf course or over a drink. Deals that changed everything we do: how we spend money; the way we work; even how we define health and illness.

This major new series by Jacques Peretti tells the story of how we sleep-walked into this new world. A world in which we were psychologically reprogrammed by pivotal business decisions to rethink every aspect of our lives.

In the late seventies, Henry Gadsden, the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company told a business magazine that the industry had a problem. In treating disease, they were limiting their client base. But by reinventing illness, treating the well and making the taking of prescription drugs as everyday as chewing a stick of gum, they could medicate modern life itself.

From ADHD in children to the way GP’s diagnose depression in adults, we look at the deals that have transformed the way we talk about and treat mental health. But what has been their real legacy? Jacques investigates the deals struck between health professionals and pharmaceutical companies and questions whether Gadsden’s dream to medicate modern life has finally been realised.

Cash

In 2015, for the first time in history, cash payments were overtaken by card and contactless transactions. But why are we turning our backs on cash? And what are we replacing it with?

In this episode, Jacques explores the deals which have shaped the way we understand money.

From the invention of Paypal in the nineties to the smartphone app economy that followed ten years later, this film tells the story of how tech giants brought about the digital payment revolution and formulated a plan to one day kill cash. But is this new world of digital, hyper-fast spending in our interests? And what is really going on behind the scenes?

Work

How did we go from clocking on and off to checking our work email in the middle of the night and working four jobs simultaneously? How did work go from being what we do to who we are?

From the creation of shared values in the workplace in the 1980’s to the deal that ushered in inflated executive pay and zero job security, Jacques reveals how key decisions over the past decades have revolutionised the workplace and our perception of work itself.

He also looks at automation in the workplace. But will the age of the robot make our working lives easier, or make us redundant as a species?

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Meet the OU experts

Meet Liz McFall and Rajiv Prabhakar, academic consultants on the series.

Our qualifications

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BA (Honours) Social Sciences

What causes riots? Is commercialisation eroding childhood? Does poverty lead to crime? Social science explores such questions and helps inform others – from police officers to civil servants to business executives – who want to base their decisions on the best evidence. The BA (Honours) Combined Social Science is designed to be very flexible, enabling you to develop a variety of knowledge and skills from a combination of subjects including psychology, sociology, social policy, criminology, geography, politics and economics. You can choose to follow a named specialism by concentrating on one of these areas, or create your own combination of subjects. This degree course will equip you with skills highly valued by employers, such as using IT for the retrieval and effective presentation of information and data; critical evaluation; and concise writing. You’ll have your own specialist, subject-based academic support as well as opportunities to join in online communities of other social sciences students for teaching, learning and peer support.
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BA (Honours) Politics, Philosophy and Economics

Politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) are central to understanding how modern societies are organised and governed, and studying them together gives you a combination of skills that's in high demand across the private, public and non-profit sectors. While the original PPE has been described as 'the degree that runs Britain', this combination is better viewed as the study of how this and other countries are run, what motivates and constrains their rulers and residents, and how social order and prosperity are best understood and promoted. All three disciplines are presented in up-to-date form, covering alternative as well as 'mainstream' approaches and firmly rooted in the real world.
Learn moreBA (Honours) Politics, Philosophy and Economics

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In this free course, Products, services and branding, you will find out about how organisations manage their products and services. This will include learning about how new products are developed and how the existing portfolio of offerings is managed. The particular characteristics of service products will be explained so that you can understand the impact that these features have on how services are managed.

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Technology, innovation and management

Develop a critical understanding of technological innovation and management. This free course, Technology, innovation and management, will provide you with an overview and introduction to a range of related concepts, ideas and debates. It adopts a broad definition of innovation and subscribes to the view that a fundamental feature of any innovation process is that it results in gaining value.

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Dr Liz McFall - Senior Lecturer in Sociology at The Open University

Copyright: Liz McFall Liz has worked for The Open University since 1991. She began as a tutor-counsellor, completed her PhD in Sociology here before becoming a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the same department. Throughout her time at the university Liz has worked on a wide variety of OU modules including DD308 Making Social Worlds and DD206 The Uses of Social Science. She is currently chair of a new module that will explore ‘digital societies’.

Liz’s research explores the making of consumer markets, especially for dull, difficult or challenging products and places like life and health insurance, payday loans and more recently Milton Keynes! She has published widely in this area. Her most recent books include Markets and the Arts of Attachment and Devising Consumption: cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending. She was the lead of a Wellcome Trust funded project Insuring healthcare in a Digital World and continues to research wearable devices, healthcare payment and policy. She is Digital Participation stream lead for the University’s Citizenship and Governance Strategic Research Area.

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Dr Rajiv Prabhakar - Lecturer in Personal Finance at The Open University

Copyright: Rajiv Prabhakar Rajiv is the Module Chair of DB123 You and Your Money which is the Department of Economics flagship course introducing students to personal finance. About 900 students take part in this twice yearly module and the topics it covers includes financial planning, debt, budgeting. He has also been involved in producing a range of modules include the core social sciences module DD102 Introducing the Social Sciences where he wrote about behavioural economics.

Rajiv’s recent research includes work on ‘asset-based welfare’, that is the idea that individual welfare depends on the ownership of assets such as savings, pensions and housing. He has also done work on taxation and on ‘financial inclusion’, that is the extent to which people are included within the financial system. He has a particular interest in how financial inclusion might extend to vulnerable groups, such as those on low income.

Rajiv has been an academic consultant on a previous three-part BBC2/OU production series called Wastemen that was broadcast in 2015 and wrote an online quiz to accompany this series. He has appeared on Radio 4 to talk about personal finance and written for publications such as the Guardian, Discover Society and Independent on Sunday.

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Originally published: Thursday, 14th September 2017
Last updated on: Thursday, 28th September 2017

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Body text - Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0: The Open University
Image 'Jacques Peretti in Front of Graffiti that reads 'If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working? RIP'' - Copyright: pulsefilmsltd
Image 'how is technology changing our lives? Launch' - The Open University under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license
Image 'Riots, police, protest' - Glenn Halog under CC-BY-NC 2.0 licence under Creative-Commons license
Image 'Crowd' - Copyright: Dreamstime
Image 'Products, services and branding' - Copyright: Used with permission
Image 'Technology, innovation and management' - Copyright: David Parker / Science Photo Library / Universal Images Group
Image 'Liz McFall ' - Copyright: Liz McFall
Image 'Rajiv Prabhakar' - Copyright: Rajiv Prabhakar
Image 'Jacques Peretti Walking Past Grafitti - 'Someone Else is Happy with Less'' - Copyright: pulsefilmsltd
Image 'Liz McFall and Rajiv Prabhakar' - Copyright: Liz McFall and Rajiv Prabhakar

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