Paul NEMITZ

Visiting Professor of Law, College of Europe; Retired Director and 'Consigliere principale' of the European Commission

No guide for the future

Carl Benedikt Frey
How Progress Ends
Princeton University Press, 2025

Carl Benedikt Frey’s How Progress Ends begins with the dramatic language of crisis, bowing to the attention economy, but offers a measured reflection on the sources and limits of modern innovation. Building on his earlier work, Frey attributes contemporary stagnation to alleged growing caution, institutional rigidity, and the fading spirit of discovery that, in his opinion, once drove economic growth. Yet the history of progress he invokes is far from innocent: much of it came from simple greed and depended on exploitation, from enslaved labour to the industrial working class.

Frey’s economic history is rich and well-argued, and his challenge to the myth of unstoppable progress is a welcome one. He rightly reminds readers that prosperity depends on governance, law, and institutional design – factors that are often overlooked in today’s technology narratives. However, his diagnosis overlooks the deep structural flaws of the modern economy: the failures of markets to serve public needs, the distortions and abuse of corporate power, widening inequality, and ecological breakdown.

At the centre of Frey’s thesis lies a tension between two forces. One is the decentralised creativity of individuals and small networks – visible in Enlightenment cafés or Silicon Valley garages. The other is the bureaucratic capacity of large corporations to standardise and scale ideas, reaping economies of scale and enabling worldwide distribution. Progress, he argues, occurs when societies manage to match these models to the needs of the time. When institutions lose flexibility and fail to adapt the framework to the signs of the time – whether by favouring experimentation or size – stagnation follows. It is a clear and elegant framework, but one that ultimately separates the politics of who benefits from ‘progress’ and who bears its costs. The question is also of how to foresee the tipping point of change from one regime to the other. Where are we today, according to Frey? The answer is unclear.

That omission shapes much of Frey’s argument. His scepticism towards regulation and democratic constraint echoes the libertarian optimism of technology’s most vocal champions. He frames environmental and legal safeguards and the precautionary principle as obstacles to innovation, aligning – perhaps unintentionally – with right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel, who equate freedom with deregulation, low taxes and the right to be contrarian and reckless. In doing this, Frey mistakes symptoms for causes. The problem is not that societies have grown risk-averse; it is that private interests have captured innovation. What he calls timidity is often the public’s rational response to an economy where the rewards of innovation in technologies or business models are privatised and its harms socialised.

This misreading becomes most visible in Frey’s silence on the rise of digital capitalism. The 21st-century economy is not a neutral arena for discovery, but a system shaped by financialisation, shareholder-value ideology and data extraction. These mechanisms have redirected creativity towards surveillance, speculation, and the manipulation of people and societies rather than towards productive or social ends. The so-called ‘productivity paradox’ – where immense technological investment produces meagre social and macroeconomic returns – reflects a deeper dysfunction: innovation has been decoupled from the common good and digital technology has been hyped.

The same pattern is now visible in artificial intelligence. Despite enormous investment, most corporate AI projects yield little practical benefit. The issue is not bureaucratic inertia but the market incentives that reward short-term hype and a quick run to monopolistic control. When the brightest engineers are designing advertising AI for social networks instead of addressing planetary challenges, the obstacle to progress lies not in regulation but in capitalism’s priorities and incentives.

Equally problematic is Frey’s treatment of environmental protection as a brake on development. Regulations aimed at preserving the planet represent not stagnation, but a redefinition of what progress means. Growth that undermines the conditions for life cannot be called advancement. Real progress in the 21st century requires aligning innovation with ecological survival, ethical responsibility and democratic accountability.

Frey’s institutional dialectic – between creative freedom and bureaucratic order – is intellectually neat but politically thin. It treats progress as a management issue, an optimisation of institutional settings, rather than a moral and social question. By reducing history to cycles of adaptation, Frey’s model sidelines the struggles that have shaped modern societies: class conflict, labour rights and movements for justice. His analysis seeks flexibility within the existing order but never questions the order itself – one structured around profit, social injustice and exclusion. He laments the concentration of corporate power but stops short of confronting how profit imperatives dominate innovation and abusive market behaviour. The privatisation of knowledge and the subordination of science to commercial interests are treated as regrettable side effects, not defining features. Even his call for ‘institutional flexibility’ can be read as an endorsement of the very neoliberal policies – deregulation, precarious labour, weakened governance – that have fuelled inequality and environmental degradation.

In Frey’s narrative, collective action and civil society are barely addressed. Politics becomes a balancing act between institutional settings, rather than a contest over values and the allocation of risks and opportunities in society. The aspirations for justice, equality, and democratic shaping of the future by people themselves have no value of their own in his vision of progress. Progress, stripped of its social meaning, becomes a question of technical efficiency – how best to stimulate innovation rather than how to direct it towards humane ends. If the story of modern technological progress is indeed nearing its conclusion, that ending need not be tragic. The exhaustion of a purely technological and profit-driven model might open the door to a new vision of advancement – one grounded in democracy, social equity and ecological resilience.

Progress must be redefined to include social and democratic creativity: the ability of communities to organise sustainably, share resources and govern collectively. Such a transformation would shift the measure of progress from speed and output to direction and purpose – toward a society that values well-being and democratic self-determination over accumulation.
How Progress Ends is worth a read as an interesting meditation on the historical rhythms of innovation, but the book falters as a guide to the present. Its admiration for unregulated creativity and suspicion of democratic restraint obscure the real sources of stagnation: inequality, corporate capture and ecological overshoot. Frey calls for renewed dynamism; what the moment demands instead is deliberate direction – a democratic reorientation of innovation towards democratic, social and ecological sustainability and the collective good.