Golden Age

In the AI Story

The post-war golden age lasted roughly twenty-five years and produced real wage growth across all income levels, expansion of the middle class, rising home ownership, and improving material living standards for hundreds of millions of people. The Victorian golden age produced comparable improvements over a longer period. In both cases, the gains were not distributed equally — racial minorities, women, and colonized populations were systematically excluded from many benefits — but the direction of distribution was progressive, and the institutional infrastructure that produced it was the most ambitious experiment in managed capitalism that any society had undertaken.

Perez's central message is that golden ages are engineered. The post-war prosperity was not a gift of the automobile or the assembly line. It was constructed through the New Deal, the Bretton Woods system, the welfare state, the G.I. Bill, the social compact between capital and labor, progressive taxation, and the expansion of education. Each of these institutions was contested, debated, and built through political processes that could have produced different outcomes. The Great Depression could have ended in fascism — it did, in several European countries. The golden age was one possibility among several.

Whether golden ages still come — whether the institutional conditions that made them possible in the past can still be produced in the early twenty-first century — is the central uncertainty of the AI turning point. Perez has acknowledged that current political conditions are less favorable than those that preceded previous golden ages. The incomplete deployment of the ICT revolution has weakened the institutional capacity, political coalitions, and social movements that historically drove turning-point reform.

The global dimension of any AI golden age poses a test the framework itself must absorb. Previous golden ages were golden ages for the advanced economies, not for colonized or developing populations. An AI golden age that replicates this pattern — broadly shared within the advanced economies, extractive in its relationship to the Global South — would not be a golden age in any morally defensible sense.

Origin

Perez derived the golden age concept from her empirical analysis of the deployment phases of previous surges, identifying the common features — broad distribution, institutional stability, sustained growth, expanded middle class — that distinguished successful deployments from failed or partial ones.

Key Ideas

Engineered, not bestowed. Every golden age was the product of deliberate institutional construction, not automatic technological progress.

Institutional architecture. Factory legislation, universal education, social insurance, the social compact — specific institutions produced the broad distribution.

Political contest. Each golden age required overcoming incumbent resistance through political mobilization during the turning point's window.

Not guaranteed. The pattern shows both progressive and regressive resolutions; golden ages can be forestalled by institutional failure.

Globally uneven. Previous golden ages excluded large populations; an AI golden age will be a test of whether this pattern can be broken.

Debates & Critiques

Whether a golden age is still structurally possible under twenty-first-century political conditions — polarization, regulatory capture, weakened labor movements, eroded social trust — is the deepest uncertainty facing any application of the Perez framework. Optimists point to the pattern's structural reliability across five revolutions. Pessimists point to the institutional deficit inherited from the information age's incomplete deployment. Perez has called her own position "tempered optimism" — not certainty that a golden age will arrive, but structural observation that the conditions for its construction are being created by the same crisis that makes it necessary.