Oil market disruptions from Iran's potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz have triggered concerns about prices reaching $150 per barrel, evoking 1970s crisis comparisons. However, expensive oil may represent a critical inflection point that aligns economic incentives with long-ignored sustainability challenges. Economic historian Carlota Perez argues that technological revolutions follow predictable patterns: installation phases of speculation and infrastructure-building, followed by deployment phases enabling broad prosperity. Digital and green technologies are transitioning from installation to deployment phases. This shift presents an opportunity for a "golden age" of shared prosperity based on knowledge, services, and sustainable practices rather than physical resource extraction, provided societies make appropriate policy choices.
"Each great technological revolution-steam power, railways, steel, automobiles, information technology-follows a predictable arc: an installation period of financial speculation and infrastructure-building, followed by a deployment period in which society learns to use the new technology productively and broadly, with a dramatic reduction in income inequality and shared prosperity as a result."
"We are, she argues, at exactly that inflection point with digital and green technologies. The installation phase-the dot-com boom, the shale revolution, the explosion of platform companies-is behind us. What comes next, if societies make the right choices, is a potential "golden age" of broad-based prosperity, grounded not in the extraction of physical materials but in the creation of knowledge, services, and sustainable."
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