CONCEPT
The New Deal
The 1930s American response to the Great Depression — the deployment-phase institutional reckoning of the oil and mass-production age that produced the architecture of the post-war golden age.
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 You On AI Field Guide
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