CONCEPT
Technological Revolutions Framework
Perez's structural theory identifying five great surges of technological development since 1771, each following a two-phase pattern of installation and deployment separated by a turning point.
Carlota Perez's framework, articulated most fully in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (2002), identifies five great surges of development since the late eighteenth century: the Industrial Revolution (1771), steam and railways (1829), steel and electricity (1875), oil and mass production (1908), and information and telecommunications (1971). Each surge follows the same two-phase structure: an installation phase driven by financial capital during which the new technology's infrastructure is built amid speculative excess, followed by a deployment phase during which production capital displaces financial capital and institutional reforms redistribute the gains. Between the two phases sits the turning point — a period of crisis and institutional reckoning that determines whether the revolution produces a golden age of broadly shared prosperity or a prolonged period of inequality.
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Perez spent four decades extracting this pattern from the historical record, testing it against the experience of radically different technologies, geographies, and political contexts. The pattern's recurrence across all five surges — despite the