PERSON
Carlota Perez
The Venezuelan-British economist who distilled two and a half centuries of capitalist revolutions into a single structural pattern—installation, turning point, deployment—and whose most alarming finding is that AI has arrived not at the beginning of a new cycle but into the institutional vacuum left by a previous revolution’s incomplete golden age.
Carlota Perez is the structural cartographer of technological revolution. Her framework, articulated most fully in
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (2002), identifies five great surges of development since Richard Arkwright opened his water-powered cotton mill in Cromford in 1771—each following the same two-phase sequence with a precision that transforms pattern recognition into something approaching prediction. The
installation phase, driven by financial capital and speculative frenzy, builds the technology’s infrastructure ahead of the institutional capacity to use it. The
turning point, typically opened by crisis, provides a window during which societies can—but are not guaranteed to—build the deployment-phase institutions that convert concentrated technological gains into broadly shared prosperity. The
deployment phase, when it arrives, is the golden age: not a gift the technology bestows but a structure that societies build, using the technology as raw material, during the brief institutional window the turning