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Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages is a hugely-influential book by Carlota Perez that suggests a connection between technological development and financial bubbles. which can be seen in the emergence of long term technology trends. She explicates her model by tracking repeated surges of technological development over the past three centuries, from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age.

Written almost 20 years ago, it contained an implicit projection of where we would be today…

For this first stab at determining just when and where we are, we’re looking at 2002’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, by Carlota Perez. One of the great economists of our time, Perez is a leading thinker on technology and socio-economic development. Her book outlines a four-phased financial cycle depicting the archetypical sequence of capital deployment and market traction for a major technological revolution. In this post, we’ll dig into Perez’s cycle and discuss where we sit today in 2021…

“Where Are We? Part 1: Bubbles, Bubbles, Toils, and Troubles“: Annika Lewis (@AnnikaSays) and David Phelps (@divine_economy) apply Perez’s principles in an attempt to figure out where we are and what our future might hold– the first in a series of attempts to break down economic theorists to try to figure out where exactly we are in a cycle.

* Robert Schiller

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As we reset our sextants, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that the 15 millionth– and final– Model T rolled off of the Ford assembly line… effectively marking the end of the beginning (the “transition phase”) of the cycle that Perez calls the “age of oil, automobiles, and mass production.”

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