How Progress Ends
Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations
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Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award
How 1,000 years of global history show why technological and economic progress is often followed by stagnation and even collapse
In How Progress Ends, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Technological advancement stagnates when met with bureaucratic sclerosis and corporate monopoly, according to this probing study from Oxford economic historian Frey (The Technology Trap). From early civilizations to the modern era, Frey examines countervailing systems for nurturing technological progress. One is a centralized state that imposes change from the top—like ancient China, which developed cast iron, printing, and other technologies long before Europe did. The other is a decentralized system that encourages exploration—as in the U.S. from the Industrial Revolution onward—where inventors can find private and public investors to fund long-shot experiments. Moving to the present, Frey argues that Silicon Valley dominated the digital age through its startup and venture capital symbiosis, and China became an industrial behemoth with a hybrid of capitalist firms and a strong state. He's pessimistic about the future prospects for innovation in both countries, however: China's drift to more rigid centralization bodes ill, and America seems ever more dominated by corporate oligarchs who would rather stifle competition than invest in research and development. AI, as a result, is better at regurgitating existing knowledge than creating breakthroughs, Frey points out. His broad yet deep survey of technology ranges across many nations and centuries, and pokes insightfully into myriad subjects, from Carolingian feudalism to patent law. The result is an incisive and stimulating consideration of a critical issue.
