CONCEPT
Golden Age
The period of broadly shared prosperity that can follow a successfully navigated turning point — constructed through institutional innovation, not bestowed by technology.
A golden age is the deployment phase's fullest realization — the period during which a technological revolution's gains are distributed broadly enough to produce sustained improvement in living standards across a population. The Victorian golden age, the post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s — each was the most broadly shared period of prosperity in the history of industrial capitalism to that point, and each was constructed through specific institutional innovations during the turning point that preceded it. Perez's framework treats the golden age not as a natural outcome of technological progress but as a structure that societies build, using the technology as raw material, during the brief window of institutional opportunity that the turning point opens.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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