The New Deal
The New Deal — the package of legislation, executive orders, and institutional innovations enacted by the Franklin Roosevelt administration between 1933 and 1938 — constituted the turning-point institutional reckoning of the fourth great surge. Financial regulation (Glass-Steagall, the SEC), social insurance (Social Security, unemployment insurance), labor protections (the Wagner Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act), and public investment (the TVA, WPA, CCC) together produced the institutional architecture on which the post-war golden age would be built. The New Deal is Perez's canonical example of how a failed turning point (the 1929 crash and the Great Depression it produced) can eventually produce a successful deployment phase if political conditions permit the construction of adequate institutional innovations.
In the AI Story
The New Deal's significance for the AI moment is multiple. First, it demonstrates that progressive deployment-phase resolution can follow even a catastrophic failure of the preceding turning point — the 1929 crash and the Great Depression were the 1920s turning point's failure, and the New Deal was the delayed construction of the deployment-phase institutions that should have been built earlier. Second, it illustrates the scale of institutional innovation that successful deployment requires: the New Deal was not a single reform but a comprehensive architecture addressing finance, labor, social insurance, and public investment simultaneously.
Third, the New Deal shows that such architecture can be constructed rapidly when political conditions permit. The core New Deal legislation was enacted within five years of Roosevelt's inauguration. The institutional innovations that had failed to emerge during the 1920s were constructed at extraordinary speed once the political coalition for reform was mobilized. This precedent is directly relevant to the AI turning point's compressed timeline: institutional innovation at the scale required has been accomplished quickly before.
Fourth, the New Deal's limitations — its exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers (disproportionately African American) from many protections, its accommodation of southern segregation, its incomplete extension of social insurance — illustrate that deployment-phase institutional construction is never perfect and always reflects the political limitations of the coalition that constructs it. The AI age's institutions will be similarly shaped by the political conditions of their construction, and the question of whether they can produce a globally distributed golden age depends on coalitions that include populations historically excluded from deployment-phase benefits.
Origin
The New Deal has been extensively documented across economic and political history. Perez's framework treats it as the archetypal example of deployment-phase institutional reckoning following a failed turning point.
Key Ideas
Deployment-phase reckoning. The New Deal constructed the institutional architecture the 1920s had failed to produce.
Comprehensive architecture. Finance, labor, social insurance, and public investment addressed simultaneously.
Rapid construction. Core legislation enacted within five years — proof that scale institutional innovation can happen quickly.
Foundation of the post-war golden age. The New Deal architecture underpinned the 1950s–1960s prosperity.
Imperfect coalition. Exclusions reflected political limitations that shaped institutional coverage.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963)
- Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013)
- David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear (1999)