(2014-04-30) Perez Interview

Carlota Perez disagrees with the popular Silicon Valley belief that we’re at the beginning of a new golden age of prosperity driven by technological innovation.

While Marc Andreessen and others believe that we’re in this third phase, Ms. Perez says we’re still in the second—and that the “TurningPoint” could be a painful one in which advanced countries experience slow growth. Tech industry prosperity can only continue if it brings the rest of the world economy along with it, she says.

Deployment is literally about deploying the power of innovation across the whole economy and about society reaping the benefits. It’s all concentrated now in ICT, finance and the urban areas of the emerging economies. So it’s understandable that [the tech industry] thinks we’re in a Golden Age.

ICT is married to the finance world completely. There’s no way to have a golden age if the powerful forces of the ICT, which are the possible engines of growth, don’t start working with governments, with society, and stop depending on the stock market.

The next golden age has to be about global development and needs capital goods, and those goods today are all information technology from the advanced countries. But right now [the tech sector] is doing their own little things. There are lots of ICT innovations for social media, the easy ones. They’re not working to guarantee that the Green Economy grows. Why green economy? The only way that two or three billion new consumers enter the market in the next 15 or 20 years—those people cannot have the American way of life... Why aren’t ICT companies pushing for the electric Smart Grid? We’ve got to have a smart grid!... It’s about how can I innovate in a direction that will create more demand?... [The tech sector] is not lobbying to make sure the markets grow. It’s about their taxes, their own interests, it’s so they won’t be bothered by regulation.

What are the policies that the tech sector should be lobbying governments for? Things that have to do with inequality. They should be asking for higher Minimum Wage. It’s in their interest. You have all these people working for WalMart and earning so little. Who’s going to buy [the tech industry’s] stuff?