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 of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute, dives into the complexities of technological progress in his latest book. He reveals why historical powers like Song China and Victorian Britain faltered despite initial strength. Frey discusses the duality of decentralization and bureaucracy in fostering innovation and warns of potential stagnation in the U.S. and China. He argues that AI's future depends on competition and exploration, not just scale, offering a thought-provoking view on the fate of nations.

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INSIGHT

Roman Fragmentation Fueled European Innovation

Roman weakness in building a centralized bureaucracy led to political fragmentation after collapse.
Fragmentation in Europe created competing polities that allowed ideas and skills to diffuse across borders.

INSIGHT

Prussian Institutions Seeded German Industrial Growth

Prussia combined institutionalized state capacity with investments in schooling and technical institutions.
That bureaucratic foundation supplied skilled managers and helped Germany industrialize rapidly.

INSIGHT

U.S. Dynamism Came From Markets And Patents

19th-century U.S. growth relied on a large internal market and a strong patent system.
Independent inventors and liquid patent markets drove exploration leading into the second industrial revolution.

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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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