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🛑 Why progress stops : My chat (+transcript) with economist Carl Benedikt Frey
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,
For most of history, stagnation — not growth — was the rule. To explain why prosperity so often stalls, economist Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping tour through a millennium of innovation and upheaval, showing how societies either harness — or are undone by — waves of technological change. His message is sobering: an AI revolution is no guarantee of a new age of progress.
Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Frey about why societies midjudge their trajectory and what it takes to reignite lasting growth.
Frey is a professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and a fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford. He is the director of the Future of Work Programme and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School.
He is the author of several books, including the brand new one ,How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations.
In This Episode
* The end of progress? (1:28)
* A history of Chinese innovation (8:26)
* Global competitive intensity (11:41)
* Competitive problems in the US (15:50)
* Lagging European progress (22:19)
* AI & labor (25:46)
Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
The end of progress? (1:28)
. . . once you exploit a technology, the processes that aid that run into diminishing returns, you have a lot of incumbents, you have some vested interests around established technologies, and you need something new to revive growth.
Pethokoukis: Since 2020, we’ve seen the emergence of generative AI, mRNA vaccines, reusable rockets that have returned America to space, we’re seeing this ongoing nuclear renaissance including advanced technologies, maybe even fusion, geothermal, the expansion of solar — there seems to be a lot cooking. Is worrying about the end of progress a bit too preemptive?
Frey: Well in a way, it’s always a bit too preemptive to worry about the future: You don’t know what’s going to come. But let me put it this way: If you had told me back in 1995 — and if I was a little bit older then — that computers and the internet would lead to a decade streak of productivity growth and then peter out, I would probably have thought you nuts because it’s hard to think about anything that is more consequential. Computers have essentially given people the world’s store of knowledge basically in their pockets. The internet has enabled us to connect inventors and scientists around the world. There are few tools that aided the research process more. There should hardly be any technology that has done more to boost scientific discovery, and yet we don’t see it.
We don’t see it in the aggregate productivity statistics, so that petered out after a decade. Research productivity is in decline. Measures of breakthrough innovation is in decline. So it’s always good to be optimistic, I guess, and I agree with you that, when you say AI and when you read about many of the things that are happening now, it’s very, very exciting, but I remain somewhat skeptical that we are actually going to see that leading to a huge revival of economic growth.
I would just be surprised if we don’t see any upsurge a
Published on 13Â hours ago