Technological Revolutions And Financial Capital

pinpointing the date of the big-bang of each technological revolution is a useful device to facilitate the understanding of the chain of processes that follow. The event in question, though apparently small and relatively isolated, is experienced by the pioneers of the time as the discovery of a new territory, as a powerful announcement of what those technologies can offer far into the future and as a call for entrepreneurial action.

The Industrial Revolution was the name given to the irruption of the machine and the inauguration of the Industrial Age. It was common in the mid-nineteenth century for people to refer to their time as the Age of Steam and Railways and, later on, when steel replaced iron and science transformed industry, the name was the Age of Steel and Electricity. By the 1920s it was the Age of the Automobile and Mass Production and, since the 1970s, the terms Information Age or Knowledge Society are in increasingly common usage.

Each technological revolution, then, is an explosion of new products, industries and infrastructures that gradually gives rise to a new techno-economic paradigm, which guides entrepreneurs, managers, innovators, investors and consumers, both in their individual decisions and in their interactions, for the whole period of propagation of that set of technologies.

each of those sets of technological breakthroughs spreads far beyond the confines of the industries and sectors where they originally developed. Each provides a set of interrelated generic technologies and organizational principles that allows and fosters a quantum jump in potential productivity for practically all economic activities. This leads each time to the modernization and regeneration of the whole productive system, so that the general level of efficiency rises to a new height every 50 years or so.

A technological revolution can be defined as a powerful and highly visible cluster of new and dynamic technologies, products and industries, capable of bringing about an upheaval in the whole fabric of the economy and of propelling a long-term upsurge of development.