Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is one of the most important books written on capitalism. Historically and theoretically! How can such a statement be made on Carlota Perez' first and (so far) only book? How can a slim volume of about 180 pages be mentioned together with works such as the 2,350 page Das Kapital by Marx, Schumpeter's 1,400 pages of Business Cycles or Å;kerman's 930 pages of Ekonomisk Teori?

Åkerman? Why mention a scarcely-ever-quoted Swedish economist (1896–1982) together with always-quoted scholars such as Marx and Schumpeter? One reason is that I happen to know that Carlota Perez appreciates his main book (Å;kerman 1944, which was translated into Spanish in 1960) above Schumpeter's work, although she – like most others (except Kindleberger 1978, Goldstein 1988) – commits the sin of not quoting it. But a more important reason is this: There is a close connection between the claim that Perez' work is theoretically important, and the paradoxical fact that most of Åkerman's work entitled ‘Economic Theory’ contains an empirical analysis of the core capitalist countries in the 1820–1940 period.

Åkerman and Perez share the same basic substantive research problem: How can patterns in the development of the core capitalist group of countries since the late eighteenth century be reconstructed in a way that serves the analysis of present economic developments? Å;kerman was a founding member of the Econometric society, but rather than converting to the econometric program of statistical inference (the Cowles commission approach as pioneered by Haavelmo and others), he continued to pursue a ‘low tech’ approach to the analysis of economic time series.