Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
Why the value in a technology shift lands decades later, with whoever rebuilds the institutions around it.
Perez maps five technological revolutions onto a repeating shape: installation, a financial bubble, a turning point, then deployment, where the technology is absorbed into how institutions actually work. The productive period is the second half.
The idea I took
This is the book behind most of what I write here. In every shift, a large share of the value went not to whoever invented the technology but to whoever made institutions able to use it safely and at scale. That is a specific kind of work, it is mostly unglamorous, and it is the work I am interested in.
Where it stops
It is a historical model, and historical models persuade in proportion to how little you know about the periods they compress. The mechanism is more convincing than the timing.