Brace for a crash before the golden age of AI
“Few scholars are better suited to place Artificial Intelligence in historical perspective than Carlota Perez.”
Financial market dysfunction, rising populism, corporate power concentration and climate change have brought us to a turning point. How we face the challenge is the subject of her next book.
John Thornhill – August 2025
Carlota Perez and the economics of hope
“The Venezuelan social scientist takes a long view, and tells gloomy intellectuals why a smart, green and fair tomorrow is on the way…
“Mainstream economics is all about equilibrium. Perez focuses instead on forces being out of kilter.”
Tom Clark – October 2021
From A Casino Economy To A New Golden Age: Carlota Pérez At Drucker Forum 2017
“Pérez drew on decades of research, decoded economic problems that trouble us all and pointed to a clear path forward…She is able to show us patterns that are not visible when we only look at what has happened in our lifetimes.”
Steve Denning — December 2017
A Life of Revolutions
“Her pioneering work has shaped our collective understanding of technological transformations…”
“We need a new economic theory. Keynes saw the role of the state but not of technology; Schumpeter saw the role of technology and not of the state; Friedman ignored both and trusted the market to do everything.”
Amir Lebdioui – IISS The Hague
October 2025
Brace for a crash before the golden age of AI
“Perez emphasized the volatility of investor sentiment, the role of new technologies in precipitating investor manias… She described how bubbles, when they burst, can be both destructive and generative.”
Barry Eichengreen –
Foreign Affairs Books of the Century
September/October 2022
Is the Information Revolution dead?
“If the Schumpeter-Perez-Freeman story holds water, we are not at the end of the information revolution. We are only partway into it, and the buildout — the golden age — has yet to come.”
W. Brian Arthur — Santa Fe Institute
March 2002
The $150 oil shock might be exactly what our future needs
“A crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is terrifying. But economist Carlota Perez has long argued that expensive oil and materials aren’t a bug in the transition to a green, knowledge-based economy—they’re a feature.”
Rita McGrath – March 2026
Digital Economy and its discontents: Ongoing crisis or precursor to Golden Age
“If we examine the long term historical big picture, patterns emerge which can help guide our understanding and planning for the future.”
Irving Wladawsky-Berger — CIO Journal, The Wall Street Journal. December 2017.
“Perez also emphasizes…that technology only leads to broad societal innovation and progress when institutions and values shift along with it…As long as this repositioning fails to occur, technology reinforces the existing rather than renewing it.”
Marco Derksen – Transitietijd.nl
October 2025
Understanding Disruption: Insights from the History of Business
“Before I read this book,” writes W. Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute “I thought that the history of technology was – to borrow Churchill’s phrase – merely ‘one damned thing after another’. Not so.”
Steve Denning — June 2014
She brings hope for a better world
“While analysis matters, we also need hopeful visions—and she delivers on that front.”
Britta Collberg — LUM Lunds Universitets Magasin
April 2017
5 Economists Redefining… Everything. Oh Yes, And They’re Women
“Green won’t spread by guilt and fear, we need aspiration and desire,” she says. Her push is towards a redefinition of the ‘good life’ and the need for “smart green growth.”
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox — May 2020.
The Benefits of Bubbles
“The definitive book on bubbles has long been Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital”
Ben Thompson – November 2025
The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions
“A brilliant — and very readable — book.”
Ben Thompson, October 2021.
A Revolutionary Technology Is Not the Same As a Technological Revolution
“Technologies can always evolve in unforeseen directions. But if they are not properly directed, they can yield increasingly dysfunctional results.”
Irving Wladawsky-Berger – March 2024
The turning point
“As we close out another turbulent year, Carlota Perez’ framework for understanding technological revolutions offers perhaps the clearest lens for making sense of our current moment.” – December 2025
“Why We Measure Everything Except What Makes Life Worth Living?” – July 2025
“No one I’ve read or heard has put these turbulent times into a historical perspective as clearly as Perez has been doing in her various publications.” –
“A Historical Perspective on the Financial Crisis” –
“A Time of Institutional Recomposition” –
“Unleashing the Next Age of Prosperity” –
Technology, Capitalism and The American Way of Life
“Capitalism is only legitimate when enabling the successful ambitions of the few to benefit the many…”
Irving Wladawsky-Berger –
A Historical Perspective On The Digital Economy
“Only with intelligent government policies providing clear directions for profitability will markets work again. And only with effective policies to restore jobs and incomes will social unrest wane.”
What John Galliano going to Zara tells us about fashion — and everything else
“The Carlota Perez lens: We are, right now, in the painful transition between those two phases and fashion, as a great cultural messenger, is reflecting the dislocations.”
Rita McGrath – April 2026
“Carlota Perez outlines the distinct phases of technological revolutions in her work Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital…The economic psychology she described is applicable to the current development of artificial intelligence.”
David B. McMillan – Seeking Alpha – March 2026
Tick, Tick…Boom!
“In her influential book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (2002), the economist Carlota Perez argued that major bubbles often accompany the early stages of general-purpose technologies.”
Jacob Weisberg – The New York Review of Books
March 2026
“The work of this outstanding academic has shed light on how technology and innovation drive economic and social development. In 2020, she was named by Forbes magazine as one of the five most influential female economists in her field and by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s 50 most important thinkers.”
March 2026 – Banca y Negocios
Democracy trapped between freedom and institutionalization
“Her framework on technological revolutions shows that economic paradigm shifts create intense pressure on political structures.”
Haluk Tükel – T24.com.tr – March – 2026
“There’s this great book by Carlota Perez where she says that bubbles always follow real waves because you attract speculators and charlatans…I believe that it’s real, and that’s why it’s attracting the charlatans. And eventually we’ll go over the top. We always do.”
Barry Ritholz and Ben Gurley – Masters in Business Podcast
March 2026
“Carlota Perez’s framework in her incredible book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, was particularly clarifying for us.”
David Eborall – Seeking Alpha
March 2026
Realinvestmentadvice.com
January 2026
“A classic work that understands the evolutionary laws of capitalism from a long-term perspective.”
Chen Yongwei
36kr European Central Station
Preface to the new edition in China of Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.
December 2025
“Carlota Pérez’s work is of immeasurable value in understanding the complexity and changes of today’s world….”
Nydia Ruiz, ceremony speaker
Doctorate Honoris Causa
Carlota Pérez
Central University of Venezuela
December 2025
“Carlota Pérez has gained worldwide prestige through her tireless work of over 40 years building a theory about major technological changes through revolutions.”
El Nacional
December 2025
Kofinas:
“We draw on Carlota Perez’s model of technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms”
Colin:
“…I was blown away…it really became my mental model to explain what is going on…”
Podcast (min.21:30) December 2025
“The true test of every technological revolution lies not in its frenzy but in its deployment…Failure to adapt, Perez warned, risks entrenching inequality and prolonging stagnation.”
Corrado Tiralongo – Lee Terry Financial Group, November 2025
“The research of economists like Carlota Perez or Chris Freeman suggests that, in all great technological revolutions of the past, the first decades are marked by turbulence.”
Vicente Pereira – Confederación Intersindical Galega,
November 2025
AI Bubble? A Necessary Prelude to a Golden Age
“Carlota Perez’s theory provides the most powerful analytical framework”
Jiang Haonong- Commercial Times CTEE
October 2025
“The risks of losing everything in the AI race are numerous. This is essentially the fate of all technological revolutions, synonymous with overinvestment and stock market bubbles, according to the work of Carlota Perez, a leading expert in the field.”
Pierre Lann- BFMTV
October, 2025
AI Is A Bubble, But It Will Be For Good: Here Is Why
“To understand the phase we are living in, we need to look at history through the eyes of Carlota Perez.”
The book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital remains a fundamental reading to understand the dynamics taking place.
Maurizio Carmigiani – September 2025
“My thinking is grounded in the study of Carlota Perez, Bill Janeway and other giants in the field”
September 2025
“I draw heavily on the work of economist Carlota Pérez.”
January 2025
Azeem Azhar – Exponential View
“According to Carlota Perez, a world authority on technological cycles, all cycles of innovation — from the Industrial Revolution to the internet boom — have been marked by crashes. ‘What we are experiencing today,’ she says, ‘is no different.”
Matheus Silva – August 2025
“Perez’s framing has been a favorite of pundits ever since – and has played a central role in the debate as to whether a much-hyped “Next Big Thing” – crypto, the metaverse, quantum computing – is merely a feature of an ongoing revolution, or the starting gun to an entirely new age.”
John Battelle – Battellemedia.com
May 2025
“Many people over time have studied what is commonly understood in Silicon Valley as the “technology adoption curve… Carlota Perez…has…sharpened our understanding of the larger impact across all of society as these technologies scaled up.”
Peter Leyden – Freethink
April 2025
**
“According to Perez’s analysis, AI in our current economy is not unlike what plastic was to the petrochemical era, McGrath explains.
‘It wasn’t the thing that sparked the revolution but it was the thing that made it ubiquitous in people’s lives.’”
Sandra O’Connel – The Irish Times
April 2025
“One of the frameworks I love is Carlota Perez´s framework…I really hope we get into this deployment phase where every sector of the economy in every part of the world truly can benefit.”
Satya Nadella & Adam Grant – Wharton Future of Work Conference. Min 28:07
May 2022
“I have been a massive fan of Carlota since I read her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital…It is a must-read text when you want to understand technological change and the context of financial capital in the economy.”
Azeem Azhar – Podcast Interview- Harvard Business Review
October 2019
What Carlota Perez Saw at the Revolution
“The power of Perez’s work is the context she provides…
“’An intelligent, active State’, is what she believes we need at this moment in the information revolution… ‘Governments need to attract the best people—creative people…’”
Sarah J Robbins – Hacking Finance – August 2019
“Ironically as the new technology cycle went from Irruption to Frenzy (remember Perez’s stages of technology revolutions), existing corporations headed in the other direction. Over the past 15-20 years as startups were funded with ever-increasing waves of investment, companies have cut back their investment in innovation.”
Steve Blank’s blog
November 2015
Moving from Installation to Deployment
“Carlota Perez, in her excellent book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, looked at these revolutions and the patterns that they created. I was really struck by what she had to say”
James Gross—Founder of Percolate
January 2015
The Deployment Age
“Her answers lie not just in technological change, but in the social, institutional, and financial aspects of our society itself.”
Jerry Neumann — Reaction Wheel
October 2015
Towards a new Golden Age
“Perez observes that market fundamentalism today is as much an obstacle to change as state fundamentalism was in the 1970s and 1980s. Artificial antagonism between private sector and public sector, is a major obstacle to progress.”
Frances Coppola — June 2014
Fight for What You Believe
Q: You are arguing that we now need a structural shift away from the casino economy – how could this happen?
A: Through a radical shift in the tax structure and other measures that will make it more profitable for finance to invest in the real economy than to continue in the casino.
Anna Handschuh Designforchangeblog
June 2013
Sustainability is the New Space Race
“We need to increase the productivity of all resources “enormously”, eliminate waste and pollution, build closed-loop systems, design for durability and rethink our built environment. ‘This will be essential for healthy lives and economic development’”
Olivia Solon — Wired
March 2013
The Evolution Of The Tech Bubble
“Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez is one of the greatest overviews of the incredible economic phenomenon known as the bubble…I instantly went to Amazon and ordered a copy, and spent the next week reading it front to back. Whew… it changed my life as well. I up and quit my job the next month.”
Nick Hughes — May 2011
The Surf is On
“Her startling prediction not only for the bad, but also for the good times should be analyzed more closely.”
Hagen Wenzek — Earth 3.0 Strategy
January 2009
Carlota Perez on the Web 2.0 Bubble
“As part of the research on the article, I had a fascinating e-mail exchange with the British economist Carlota Perez…Here are excerpts from her writing to me for your reading pleasure.”
Brad Stone — The New York Times
October 2007
