Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award
How Progress Ends
Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations
Carl Benedikt Frey
Princeton University Press
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Pianeta Libri news. Turin, August 29, 2025 – Carl Benedikt Frey’s new book, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, Princeton University Press, 2025, is an imposing work of more than 500 pages, expanding and deepening the path opened with The Technology Trap (2019). While that earlier volume focused mainly on the effects of automation and the conflicts between capital and labor, here the scope extends across a thousand years of history and all the world’s most representative regions: China, Japan, Europe (especially Prussia, Tsarist Russia, Victorian Britain), the United States, up to the contemporary age.
The ambition is clear: to explain why some nations have prospered and innovated, while others, despite abundant resources, have experienced stagnation or decline. Frey shows that technological progress is far from inevitable, depending largely on institutions, political culture, and the way power is organized.
The thread running through the book is the tension between decentralization and centralization. Institutional freedom, diversity, and competition among centers of power foster exploration and the emergence of new ideas, even from marginal innovators—individuals or small groups operating at the edges of established systems, introducing innovations before large institutions adopt them on a wider scale. Bureaucracy and centralized control, while useful in scaling discoveries, tend to rigidify systems, defend entrenched interests, and ultimately stifle innovation. The histories of imperial China, modern Europe, Victorian Britain, and recent Asian economies provide eloquent examples of these mechanisms.
Particularly noteworthy are the chapters on contemporary China, where Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign intertwines with the dynamics of a strongly centralized power, and those on the United States, where Frey identifies risks linked to the consolidation of oligopolies and institutional weakening. Reflections on Japan focus on the rapid Meiji modernization and the limits of a development model built around the large integrated corporation. Those on Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union highlight how bureaucracy and the repression of diversity first slowed and then sterilized innovative potential, while the analysis of emerging economies offers a direct comparison with today’s challenges.
The book has already received international recognition: it was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025 and was selected by Foreign Policy as one of the summer’s must-read books. Its critical reception has been widely positive, both in academia and in the media, which praised its historical breadth and its ability to connect past and present.
For administrators, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and managers, the lesson is clear: it is not enough to invest in research and development; what is needed is an institutional context capable of protecting experimentation, guaranteeing spaces of freedom, and maintaining the diversity necessary for innovation. This is as true today, in the age of artificial intelligence, as it was in the past.
Conclusion
How Progress Ends is an important book, one that will likely become a reference point in debates on technology, progress, development, and decline. It warns that technological progress is not guaranteed, that institutions can betray their promises, and that many currently rising models may already carry within them seeds of stagnation. It unlocks questions many policy makers avoid, because it warns against authoritarian or oligopolistic models that appear efficient in the short term but are risky in the long run, and because it forces us to look at the past to understand the future.
A book that combines historical rigor, institutional analysis, and contemporary relevance. Essential for anyone concerned with the public uses of technology, the governance of innovation, and international politics. One of the best recent books on these subjects.
Author’s Biography
Carl Benedikt Frey is Professor of Practice in Economic Innovation and Director of the “Future of Work” program at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom). Born in Germany, he studied economics and economic history at Lund, the London School of Economics, and Oxford, where he developed a multidisciplinary approach that blends economic analysis with historical perspective. He is internationally known for his research on the effects of digital technologies and automation on work and society.
His book The Technology Trap (2019) had wide resonance, placing him at the center of the global debate on automation and inequality. With How Progress Ends, he consolidates his reputation as a historian and economist of innovation able to connect long-term cycles with contemporary challenges. He regularly collaborates with international institutions, governments, and media, and has been included in leading rankings such as those of the Financial Times and Foreign Policy. He lives between Oxford and Germany, maintaining both academic and family ties in the two countries.
By Giovanni Paparo
How Progress Ends
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