Episode
🛑 Why progress stops : My chat (+transcript) with economist Carl Benedikt Frey
- Published
- Oct 8, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 1428
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/faster-please-the-podcast-5630783/episodes/why-progress-stops-my-chat-transcript-with-economist-carl-benedikt-frey/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/faster-please-the-podcast-5630783/why-progress-stops-my-chat-transcript-with-economist-carl-benedikt-frey.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
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.…