Interviews and Podcasts

Professor Carlota Perez has spent her career researching the profound impact technology has had on socio-economic development.  In this fascinating interview, we explore the two distinct phases of a technological revolution as outlined by Carlota: installation – or experimental early phase – and deployment (or “Golden Age”).  Carlota emphasizes the critical role governments play in this phase. By setting a clear and context-sensitive pathway for the transformation through new policies, regulations and taxes, the state can ensure a win-win outcome for both business and society.  Considering the trends from the four previous technological revolutions, Carlota compares the current socio-economic situation to the 1930s and suggests how we can move forward towards a sustainable golden age for our information revolution.

Carlota Perez is a Venezuelan-British researcher and educator, currently affiliated to three universities in the UK ­– LSE, IIPP-UCL and SPRU (Sussex) – and to TalTech in Estonia.  She specializes in the relationship between technology and socio-economic development, with a focus on techno-economic paradigm shifts and the theory of great surges (a development of Schumpeter’s work on Kondratieff waves). Her book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, published in 2002, has had a profound impact on our understanding of how technology shapes our institutional, economic, and social development.

How do we exploit the technological revolution for green growth and global development? Celebrated economist, author, and scholar, Carlota Perez joins Azeem Azhar to discuss the nature of techno-economic paradigm shifts and current progress in the cycle of technological revolution. Perez is the author of one of the most influential books on the subject, “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital”

In this podcast, Carlota and Azeem also discuss:

• The new welfare state.
• How universal basic income could increase innovation.
• If we’re on the verge of a new Golden Age.

Further reading:

• “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages” (Carlota Perez, 2002)
• “A Smart Green ‘European Way of Life’: the Path for Growth, Jobs and Wellbeing” (Beyond The Technological Revolution, Carlota Perez and Tamsin Murray-Leach, March, 2018)
• “The Two Innovation Economies: Follower and Frontier” (Bill Janeway, Sept. 9, 2013)

While in many ways it feels like we live in unprecedented economic times, through another lens we have been here before. Dr. Carlota Perez charts economic cycles around technological breakthroughs, and she provides needed clarity on our current economic moment. In this episode, she discusses where we are in today’s economy, how we could proceed forward in a productive way, and the stakes in getting this moment right.

Carlota Perez. British-Venezuelan researcher, lecturer and international consultant, specialized in the social and economic impact of technical change and on how it changes opportunities for growth, development and competitiveness. In her acclaimed book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages she presented a theory of the role of finance in the creative destruction process brought about by technical change that has helped understand the boom and bust episodes of the last two decades. She is Professor of Technology and Development at the Technological University of Tallinn, Estonia, Research Associate at CFAP/CERF, Cambridge Finance, Judge Business School and Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Economics, both at Cambridge University, U.K. and Honorary Professor at SPRU, Science and Technology Policy Research, School of Business, Management and Economics, University of Sussex, U.K. Her articles from the early 1980s have helped understand the relationship between technical and institutional change, between finance and technological diffusion and between technology and economic development. As consultant and lecturer she has worked for various public and private organizations, for major corporations (IBM, Cisco, Ericsson, Telefonica, etc,) and for governments in Latin America, North America, Europe and Asia as well as for the EU, the OECD, the UN and several multilateral agencies. In the early 1980s, when acting as Director of Technological development in the Ministry of Development in Venezuela, she founded the first venture capital agency in the country. She is frequently invited to participate as keynote speaker in major international academic, public policy and business events.