Books by Carl Benedikt Frey

“He looks back to civilizations over the last millennium and examines why they have stalled when it comes to progress. For example, he writes about China losing its way after the Song Dynasty. Having been a great, inventive nation, it becomes bogged down in bureaucracy…There’s a failure to adapt to technology, which inevitably dooms a civilization if it can’t find a way through it. So it’s a heavyweight book that gives you a grand historical perspective on the key question of how to guarantee growth and continued technological advance.” Read more...

The Best Business Books of 2025: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

Andrew Hill, Journalist

“Carl’s work is about what the impact of this new wave of technology and automation is going to be on everybody’s jobs and standards of living. He does that by taking a historical perspective and looking at the Industrial Revolution. The fact is that for quite a long period there wasn’t any increase in average standards of living and indeed, as we know from literature, there was a period of great misery for lots of people as they moved from the countryside to work in the mills and so on. The question he’s asking is, ‘Is it going to be the same this time? Is history going to repeat itself?’ and ‘Are there things we can try and think about in terms of policy that will stop history repeating itself?’” Read more...

The Best Economics Books of 2019

Diane Coyle, Economist