Carl Benedikt Frey

“To construct a nuanced theory of progress, we must first confront several pivotal questions: Why was economic growth sluggish for millennia, despite sparks of genius from Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton? Why did the Industrial Revolution first take off in eighteenth century England and not in Song China, despite the latter’s early technological lead? Why did certain societies, such as Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan, swiftly catch up with England while others did not? What explains episodes of extraordinarily rapid advancement, sometimes spearheaded by autocratic regimes like the USSR, followed by periods of lacklustre growth or even collapse? And how can we account for the endurance of America’s technological leadership for more than a century—a run that has defied numerous predictions that it would be overtaken by the Soviet Union in the 1960s and Japan in the 1980s?”
― Carl Benedikt Frey, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations