Recession? Crisis? Nah, it's just a transition.

Who now speaks is Cambridge economist Carlota Perez, whose book Technological Revolutions and Finantial Capital has almost acquired the dimensions of a classic, placing our present economic situation in the context of the big shifts that take place every 50 years or so in the technological field.

For her, we have reached puberty in the Information Age, which started in 1971with the production of computer chips and its universalization in the following decades, which she calls "Installation phase", that is, adaptation phase. What the world is now experiencing might take 20 to 30 years until those new technologies start generating big steps in our quality and standards of living. "Times of Deployment", she says. This actual period in which we live is nothing more than a painful transition between both phases.

"At the top, we sin for our excesses. At the bottom, we self-correct", she says, and complements, "Today's economic crisis, along with the internet bubble in 2000, belong to a distinct nature." We are experiencing a collapse bigger than usual, equivalent to the investment in rail roads in the XIX century and the dark days in 1929. This sort of collapses only occur each half of a century, before big technological revolutions.

In correlating the market crash to the internet bubble, Perez tells us that "finantial excesses were inducted by the existance of easy and abundant credit, while the internet attracted investments under the presumption that the new technologies would generate extraordinary profits." The difference is that in 1929 everything collapse at once. This time, it happened in two different times, it had two different chapters.

Perez, in my opinion, seems to be one of the few economists to have actually any clue about our future in a globalized world. This recession, or transition, might last from 2 to 15 years, and it only depends on our capacity to analyze and recognize what it exactly is in order to take the necessary steps towards its solution. If we believe that this crisis is only a problem generated from the lack of trust in the finantial market, we will keep on applying superficial policies and injecting money into the system in order to ressuscitate Real State and Wall Street. In this case, she says, "this recession will be longer and another bubble will appear and the colapse will be even bigger." The ideal would be to formulate a "finantial market with fiscal policies of control." Public money should be directed to the support of productive and innovative investments.

The essential is, she tells us, "to promote expansion and innovation in production." Just make sure you recognize your resources and limitations, dear Earth, I reply. Refresh, refresh, refresh.