- Joined
- Apr 26, 2014
- Messages
- 2,592
- Points
- 63
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.
About the Author
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. He is also a fellow at Mansfield College, the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford, and Lund University’s Department of Economic History. His books include The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (Princeton).
Click here to download the ebook (epub, pdf)
File size of cbfhpe.zip is 14.4 MB
The SHA3-256 checksum of cbfhpe.zip is adf56ed8097974c6d60f49374a600ebeb886d1bf0008fb65aa82925117b4c863
Please ensure that your calculated SHA3-256 hashsum of cbfhpe.zip is identical to the one above before unzipping it.
Password to unzip
sammyboy
Click here to download the audiobook (mp3 format)
File size of cbfhpe-audio.zip is 466 MB
The SHA3-256 checksum of cbfhpe-audio.zip is 9ef9f0961817313f606efeb1865f220b262429553d489a1f71b4f176ba937b4c
Please ensure that your calculated SHA3-256 hashsum of cbfhpe-audio.zip is identical to the one above before unzipping it.
Password to unzip
sammyboy
BOOK REVIEW
Click here to download and read it in hi-res
