Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Nov 19, 2025

Carl Benedikt Frey, a Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, delves into the complex relationship between technology and economic progress. He argues that historical stagnation reveals that progress isn't a given. Frey compares the fates of past powers like Victorian Britain and China, discussing how bureaucratic structures can both foster and hinder innovation. He highlights the need for decentralization to ignite growth, while warning that modern trends in both the U.S. and China might lead to stagnation if not addressed.

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INSIGHT

Progress Is Contingent, Not Inevitable

Progress is not inevitable; industrial revolutions took hundreds of millennia to emerge.
If progress were inevitable, every country would be rich and Britain wouldn't face productivity stagnation.

INSIGHT

Bureaucracy Builds Scale But Curbs Exploration

China's strong bureaucracy enabled large-scale infrastructure and market integration under the Song.
That centralization pulled talent into state roles and reduced independent scientific and technical exploration.

INSIGHT

Fragmentation Fueled European Innovation

European political fragmentation created a market space for ideas and mobility of skilled craftsmen.
That fragmentation plus cultural unity helped ideas and skills proliferate across states.

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In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change.

By examining key historical moments--from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI--Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past--such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain--ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term--findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today.

Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the past.

Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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