Technological progress is not an inevitable “natural” phenomenon. We have seen it accelerate, stagnate and diverge in many different forms in different moments of history. Why? In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation and the Fate of Nations, Carl Benedikt Frey, an economic historian and Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute, tries to answer this question by studying the impact that political institutions have in the development and diffusion of technology.

Frey classifies political systems into two broad categories based on how decisions about resources are made. In centralized systems, such as those we see in China and Russia today, a unified bureaucratic hierarchy determines how a nation’s main resources are distributed. In decentralized systems, by contrast, these decisions are dispersed among multiple stakeholders, chiefly the private sector. Using this framework, Frey advances the central thesis of the book: neither system is perfectly suited for every nation, nor for every stage of maturity of a particular technology. Each has its own “ecological niche”.

These systems differ in their capacity to generate distinct types of efficiency. Centralized systems are more apt for increasing static efficiency through incremental innovations. Static efficiency refers to the optimal use of labor and capital to maximize social welfare under a system’s present conditions. Because mature technologies have proven economic benefits, a single decision-making point can more easily direct resources to maximizing those benefits by developing incremental improvements. Decentralized systems, on the other hand, are better suited for achieving dynamic efficiency, that is, adapting to changes over time. Distributed decision-making fosters diversity of thought, which in turn encourages experimentation and the exploration of new technologies. Innovation is achieved over time.

Frey doesn’t treat these categories as binary. The characterization of a system as centralized or decentralized seems a matter of degree, and nations move between periods of centralization and decentralization.

The bulk of the book applies this framework to the history of China, England, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, and the United States, spanning several centuries. We learn why, for example, institutional descentralization enabled the Industrial Revolution to occur in England, where innovators to resist the guilds, and the digital revolution in the United States, where the private sector was able to leverage government investments and partnerships to drive advances in computing and digital technologies. In Europe, by contrast, centralized bureaucratic governments achieved the “Western European economic miracle” between 1950 and 1973, when productivity soared by absorbing technologies developed in the United States, but they failed to produce leading technologies or globally dominant technology firms in the 21st century.

In the last part of the book Frey reflects on the current state of affairs and warns of signs of stagnation in both China and the United States. In the last 50 years, China has effectively leveraged its bureaucracy to develop technology clusters, such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, and the Rust Belt, and has allowed for privatization of certain sectors of the economy. The highly centralized, patronage-based economy under Xi Jinping has also enabled the country to excel in incremental innovations in machine learning (think of DeepSeek, or the Chinese government’s power to collect citizen data for AI). However, this same centralization may also make China to focus its resources exessively in the current data-thristy AI models, creating a technological technological lock-in that would constrain exploring alternative approaches to the development of AI.

In the United States, large firms are using AI to optimize and scale existing operations, emphasizing efficiency and expansion. But startups, which more likely to experiment with new products and business models and push innovation in new directions, are facing increasing barriers to entry. For example, Frey explains that 75% of US industries are more concentrated now than in the 1990s, and large companies entrench their position through regulatory capture. On a side note, the EU is not doing much better; the IMF calculates that the EU’s internal barriers act as a 45% tariff on manufactured goods and a 110% tariff on services, making it difficult for startups to enter the market.

A few caveats are worth noting. First, this is a dense book. At around 400 pages, although it avoids technical language, it goes deep into the history of each country You may find yourself unexpected reading about agricultural institutions in the 19th-century Tsarist Russia. Second, the analysis is tightly focused on the central thesis, so there’s not much exploration of how other factors, including instuttions like civil liberties and fundamental rights, might also play a role in the technological progress of a nation. Third, the book seems to overgeneralize the binary categorization. The book does not really explore how some countries may defy this categorization and may be better explained as hybrids that employ different approaches across sectors or technologies or even regions. Finally, I missed at least some references to the history of other regions like Latin America and Africa.

How Progress Ends is a very interesting and timely book. It offers a compelling framework for understanding current economic phenomena, from the global AI race to the new “Gilded Age” in the United States. I strongly recommend it.

Sources:

• Watch a video of the author talking about this book here.

If you’ve ever wondered if the plants in your garden have a secret life that you don't know about, The Light Eaters, by Zoë Schlanger, a science writer for the Atlantic, brings together the latest science to answer this and many other fascinating questions about the world of plants.

Most of the chapters focus on a particular way in which plants sense the world. There's a chapter, for example, on how plants can "hear". Some plants can perceive the sound vibrations of a predator, like a caterpillar, chewing their leaves, and trigger a defense mechanism in response to those vibrations. Others use their “hearing” not for protection but for reproduction: The beach evening primrose can increase its sweetness within 3 minutes of "hearing" the flight of honeybees nearby and attract them to increase its chances of pollination.

There's an even more fascinating chapter about vision. The Boquila trifoliata, or Chameleon Vine, is a parasitic plant that grows in Chile and that it is able to mimic the physical apperance of its host plant. It's not that the vine, through evolution, ends up looking like its host plant; It is that each individual Chameleon Vine transforms itself to look like its host plant. How can a plant mimic the shape and colors of another if it doesn’t see it? Does this mean that it has some sort of vision? Let that sink in.

Like these, there are fascinating chapters about how plants communicate with each other and even with animals, how they store "memories" to increase their chances of survival and reproduction and how they even have, in some sense, distinct personalities and social lives.

But here's where the book turns on more controversial. Isn’t all this talk of senses, personalities and social lives just a way to anthropomorphize plants? Aren't scientists wrongly using our human mental frameworks to explain plant behavior, in a way seeing more than what is actually there? Schlanger doesn't shy away from these controversial discussions and even turns these criticisms on their head. When we talk about intelligence or consciousness, we tend to think about human intelligence and human consciousness. It is clear that plants don't have those, but this doesn't mean that we shouldn't call them intelligent. If intelligence is understood broadly as the ability to react to the environment and solve problems, plants are by all means "intelligent". Schlanger brilliantly makes this point. Her arguments, however, are much weaker when asking whether plants have "consciousness". Schlanger seems to conflate the two concepts and, if we understand consciousness as the capacity to identify oneself as a separate being and to reflect on that uniqueness, she really doesn’t present any evidence for it.

Schlanger uses her love of plants and her journey researching the book as the common thread to the book. In every chapter there's one or sometimes several stories about her research and sometimes even personal ones. As a nonfiction reader, I generally don't like when authors weave their own anecdotes and personal stories with the science. Schlanger doesn't do it to the point of making the book boring, and many of the stories are entertaining, but some of the chapters would've been better if some of these stories were ommitted.

This is a 265-page book for the lay reader. It’s a good and helpful overview of the science and it’s a good roadmap to continue your exploration on your own. If you love plants, you'll love this book. But even if you are like me and have no particular interest or knowledge about plants, you’ll enjoy it as a great introduction to a whole new world.

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