CONCEPT
Double Frenzy, No Golden Age
Carlota Perez’s most alarming diagnosis: the ICT revolution has now produced two speculative frenzies—the dot-com bubble and the AI investment surge—without constructing the deployment-phase institutions that every previous surge required before a broadly shared golden age could arrive.
Every previous great surge in the history of industrial capitalism produced one speculative frenzy before reaching its turning point. The
canal mania preceded the railway era. The railway boom preceded the age of steel. The dot-com bubble preceded what should have been the information age’s
deployment phase.
Carlota Perez observed in 2019 what no previous version of her framework had been required to explain: the ICT revolution had produced
two frenzies—the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and the AI investment surge beginning around 2022—without the golden age that was supposed to follow the first. “We have had 2 frenzies and we have not yet had a golden age,” she wrote. The implication is structural and unprecedented: the
turning point that should have followed the first frenzy’s crash was navigated without the institutional construction that every previous turning point produced. The
deployment-phase institutions—educational reforms, labor market restructuring, social insurance adequate to structural displacement,