Everyone in this cluster is explaining the same thing: the bursts of technology that reorganize the economy since about 1770. They divide on what the unit is, what drives it, and whether it repeats.
| Thinker (work) | What a “technological revolution” is | Prime driver | Time-shape | Finance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perez 2002 theorem | A great surge: a revolution plus its techno-economic paradigm plus a financial cycle, moving through five fixed phases | Finance | Recurring, about every 50 years; five surges, four phases each | the engine |
| Mokyr 1990 / 2002 Lever of Riches; Gifts of Athena | The growth of useful knowledge (propositional and prescriptive); the Industrial Enlightenment | Knowledge and culture | Cumulative and contingent; no cycle, no recurrence | absent |
| Gordon 2016 Rise and Fall of American Growth | A one-off cluster of Great Inventions that raised the American standard of living | A special set of general-purpose inventions | One wave, 1870–1970, not repeatable (the future disappoints) | peripheral |
| Smil 2005 Creating the Twentieth Century | The greatest technical discontinuity in history, concentrated in 1867–1914 | Engineering and energy | One discontinuity; the century after only improved and diffused it | absent |
| Ding 2024 Technology and the Rise of Great Powers | A general-purpose technology whose economy-wide diffusion decides great-power races | Institutions (diffusion capacity) | GPT waves as the backdrop to power transitions | peripheral |
| GPT economists Bresnahan-Trajtenberg 1995; Lipsey-Carlaw-Bekar 2005 | A general-purpose technology: one pervasive input with innovational complementarities | A pervasive enabling technology | Two dozen GPTs across history; no phase law | absent |
| Freeman & Louçã 2001 As Time Goes By | The same techno-economic paradigm, embedded in five subsystems of society | Technology and institutions, co-evolving | Recurring long waves; timed half a cycle off Perez | secondary |
The shared ancestors: Schumpeter (creative destruction, the entrepreneur and the financier as the two wheels) and Kondratiev (the half-century long wave). Every member reckons with both. Perez builds on Schumpeter and argues against Kondratiev; Smil argues against both; Ding nods to Schumpeter and ignores Kondratiev. Same two ancestors, opposite uses (section IV).
Perez is the only one who makes finance the engine and the cycle a recurring law.
Mokyr, Gordon and Smil treat technology as secular and non-repeating: cumulative useful knowledge, one special century, one great discontinuity. Ding and the GPT economists treat it as diffusion or taxonomy. Only Perez runs a clock, and only Perez makes the clock financial. The decoupling and recoupling of financial and production capital is what drives her five-phase sequence, and the sequence is what repeats.
The citation base confirms it. Her heavy sources are financial historians: Kindleberger (21), Sobel (16), Susan Strange (12), Galbraith (10), Soros (9), Minsky (7), roughly seventy-five mentions of the mania-and-crash literature. The technology-history guild that anchors the others is absent or glancing: Mokyr zero, Maddison zero, Paul David zero, Rosenberg one, von Tunzelmann one, Nelson and Winter one. The one classic of industrial history she leans on is Landes (7). The book is a finance-history book wearing Schumpeterian clothes, which the title says plainly, and which is exactly what separates her from the technologists.
Consecration made the split visible. When Barry Eichengreen named three “books for the century” in economics (Foreign Affairs, 2022), he put Perez beside Chandler’s The Visible Hand and Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Gordon is her opposite number in this cluster: one special century against her five equal surges. The field files them together and reads them against each other.
Who a book counts is its frame made measurable. The scholars who define the modern study of technological change are constitutive-to-heavy for Ding and Smil, and ghost-or-thin for Perez. Counts are body-text mentions in each carded book (Perez recount 2026-07-22, body only).
| Scholar (line) | Perez | Smil | Ding | What they are to the field |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mokyr useful knowledge | 0 | 4 | 43 | The leading historian of technological change. Gifts of Athena is the same year as Perez, 2002. Ding’s second-heaviest source; her clean ghost. |
| Paul David path dependence, QWERTY | 0 | 10 | 75 | Ding’s single heaviest source; evidentiary for Smil. Perez takes lock-in from Brian Arthur (4) and never cites David. |
| Rosenberg inside the black box | 1 | · | 58 | Constitutive for Ding (the 1963 machine-tool convergence). One glancing nod in Perez (Rosenberg-Frischtak 1984). |
| Maddison growth accounting | 0 | 5 | · | The quantitative long-run growth historian; absent from Perez, consistent with her thin econometrics and her rejection of aggregate series. |
| von Tunzelmann steam, industrialization | 1 | · | ✓ | A neo-Schumpeterian tech historian, one of her own school; in her bibliography, cited once in the body. |
| Her finance base for contrast | 75 | — | — | Kindleberger 21, Sobel 16, Strange 12, Galbraith 10, Soros 9, Minsky 7. The mania-and-crash tradition that the technologists never touch. |
In the bibliography but never cited in the body: Wallerstein (the world-systems ghost, alongside the uncited Arrighi and Braudel). Thin nods of one mention each: Nelson and Winter (1977, ‘natural trajectory’), Abramovitz (1986, catch-up). The pattern is consistent: the tradition that studies how technology itself accumulates is not her evidence base. Finance history is.
The three carded books share node ids, so the merged graph shows, without anyone hand-coding it, that the same ancestors are put to opposite uses. Format: relationship / engagement (mentions).
| Shared node | Perez (finance) | Smil (technology) | Ding (institutions) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schumpeter 1939 | builds-on / constitutive (33) the declared foundation | argues-against / adversarial (1) the cyclical Schumpeter rejected | acknowledges / courtesy (11) a nod |
| Kondratiev 1935 | argues-against / adversarial (8) rejects the dating, keeps the rhythm | argues-against / adversarial (2) | parallel / none (0) ignored |
| Mokyr 1990 | rival / ghost (0) | draws-evidence / evidentiary (4) | draws-evidence / evidentiary (43) |
| Paul David 1990 | ghost (0) | draws-evidence / evidentiary (10) | builds-on / constitutive (75) |
| Freeman & Louçã 2001 | sibling / evidentiary (6) her own school | · | subsumes / extractive (15) mined, framework dropped |
| Perez 2002 (how they treat her) | — | argues-against / adversarial (1) his 1867–1914 would cut her surges 3 and 4 | acknowledges / courtesy (4) |
The keystone reads down the Mokyr and David rows: the cumulative-knowledge and path-dependence economists are Ding’s two heaviest sources and real sources for Smil, and neither appears in Perez. Reading across the Schumpeter row: one ancestor, three stances (foundation, foil, courtesy). Smil is the only member who engages Perez directly, and he does it to dispute her boundary between the third and fourth surges.
Counts are body-text mentions from full pdftotext extractions of each book; the Perez column is a body-only recount (bibliography and index excluded) done 2026-07-22 while confirming her citation anatomy, which corrected several first-pass weights and two work identities. Smil and Ding counts are from their card networks. A dot means the node is not surfaced in that card; a check means present in the bibliography with a single body cite. Carded members: perez-2002 · smil-2005 · ding-2024. In the field, not yet carded: Mokyr (The Gifts of Athena, the cumulative-knowledge antithesis) and Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the one-century challenger) are the two most useful next cards, since both are already shared nodes across the set. Shared node ids let these single-book graphs union into one field map as the cluster grows.