After the Crisis: Creative Construction

In Technological revolutions and Financial Capital: the Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages [1], I have suggested that growth in the world economy takes place by successive surges of about half a century, each driven by a technological revolution. The massive changes that this brings each time around, not only in technology but also in production systems and organization, in means of communication, transport and distribution, in patterns of consumption and styles of living involve great behavioural upheavals in the economy and society. For that reason, the difficult process of unlearning the old and absorbing the new takes twenty or thirty turbulent years of "creative destruction." [2] It is after the massive paradigm shift has been basically achieved, that the fruits of the new technologies in higher productivity and widespread innovation can be reaped and socially shared.