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

Nov 19, 2025

Carl Benedikt Frey, Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, challenges the idea of inevitable progress in his new book. He delves into how history has shown technological advancement can lead to stagnation and failure. Frey discusses why some nations, like the Soviet Union, collapsed despite earlier successes. He emphasizes the interplay between decentralization, bureaucracy, and innovation. Moreover, he warns that both the U.S. and China risk stagnation unless diverse approaches to AI and competitiveness are maintained.

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INSIGHT

Progress Is Contingent Not Inevitable

Progress is not inevitable; it took 200,000 years to reach the Industrial Revolution.
If progress were inevitable, every country would be rich and Britain wouldn't face productivity stagnation.

INSIGHT

Bureaucracy Built Capacity But Dampened Exploration

Chinese bureaucracy built capacity via unified writing, soil mapping, and irrigation that integrated markets.
That centralized system attracted talent into administration and reduced incentives for disruptive exploration.

INSIGHT

Fragmentation Fueled European Innovation

European political fragmentation allowed skilled craftsmen and ideas to move across borders.
That mixture of fragmentation plus cultural unity created a market for intellectual and technological exploration.

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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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