Kondratiev 2017
"The theory that capitalism at the technology frontier operates in higher- and lower-growth cycles was originally developed nearly a century ago by the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev, who, for his efforts to explain capitalism’s seemingly inexorable ability to renew itself, was executed by Stalin in 1938.

Kondratiev’s theory postulates that over the past 250 years or so, capitalism has evolved through a series of forty- to sixty-year cycles, based on what the leading industrial sectors were for countries at the technology frontier. According to Kondratiev’s theory, each of these “K-waves” follows a similar cycle.

First, a new breakthrough technology or set of technologies is invented and rolled out broadly. What defines these technologies is that they are “platform” technologies (what economists call “General Purpose Technologies”) that not only dramatically enhance worker productivity, but also enable the creation of new businesses and whole new categories of employment previously unimagined.

After about twenty or thirty years, however, most of the gains associated with the new technology have been realized and productivity growth begins to slow. With technological differentiation no longer enabling business growth as effectively, businesses respond by creating various regulatory barriers to competition, or by moving production to lower-cost sites away from the sites of the technological frontier. For the sites on the technological frontier, this is a time of dearth. As always, it is the lower orders who suffer most, and thus what begins as technological senescence develops into economic stagnation and, if not addressed by political elites, eventually builds into a crisis of political legitimacy.



[..] This is a crucial point, and one that Kondratiev himself did not sufficiently appreciate: In order for countries to thrive, technology is not enough; rather it is the assemblage of technology and institutions that is critical. States that fail to reconfigure their political and economic institutions to accommodate and exploit the new technologies risk ceding their countries’ spot on the technology frontier to nimbler competitors.

From this perspective, what was critical to the British economy’s ability to reap the productivity benefits associated with the second technological wave of railroads and steel were institutional reforms, including the abolition in 1846 of tariffs on grain imports, which lowered the cost of food for the growing class of industrial laborers. In other words, as railroads and steamships technologically enabled the creation of transnational grain markets, institutional reform allowed Britain to translate that technological potential into improved productivity across the industrial landscape.

[..] Whereas companies like Oracle and Microsoft, whose business software drastically increased the economic productivity of their users, typified the first phase of the infotech revolution, the emblematic software company founded since 2000 has been Facebook, a media company that, although not without its virtues, has also been an unsurpassed anti-productivity machine in the history of technology.

[..] Unless we get both a new K-wave going on the basis of new platform technologies and rework our political order, our politics are likely to remain poisonous. So the question is, what are the prospects for a similar renewal?

[..] For example, the locomotive was invented in 1804, but railroads only emerged as a K-wave platform for growth in the 1830s–40s; likewise, the automobile was invented in the 1880s, but only emerged as a true K-wave driver after World War II; and computers were invented in the 1940s, but only began to drive our current K-wave in the 1980s."

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/09/12/technoglobalism-and-its-discontents/