Carl Benedikt Frey
Swedish-German economist and economic historian
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Carl Benedikt Frey is a Swedish-German economist and economic historian. He is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford.[1] He is widely known for his 2013 paper with Michael A. Osborne, "The Future of Employment," which estimated that 47% of US jobs were at high risk of automation, becoming one of the first and most cited works on AI's impact on labor markets.[2][3][4]
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Frey in 2016 | |
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| Occupations | Economist, economic historian |
Frey is also the author of The Technology Trap (2019) and How Progress Ends (2025), which was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award.[5][6][7]
He has written for newspapers and magazines such as the Financial Times, The Economist (By Invitation), The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Wired and Scientific American.[8][9][10][11][12]
Career
Frey was born in Stockholm, Sweden. After attending Katedralskolan, he studied economics, history and management at Lund University. Developing a strong interest in economic history and technological change, Frey completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich. He subsequently joined the Oxford Martin School where he founded the programme on the Future of Work. Between 2012 and 2014, he was teaching at the Department of Economic History at Lund University.[13]
In 2012, Frey became an economics associate of Nuffield College and Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, both University of Oxford.[14][15] He remains a visiting fellow of the Department of Economic History at Lund University. In May 2023, he was appointed the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and became a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford.
Research and publications
In 2013, Frey, together with Oxford professor Michael Osborne, co-authored "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization".[16][17] With over 20,000 citations according to Google Scholar, the study's methodology has been used by President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, the Bank of England, the World Bank, as well as a popular risk-prediction tool by the BBC.[18][19][20][21]
The study entered popular culture and policy debate alike, featuring on HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in 2019.[22]
Although the Frey and Osborne study has often been taken to imply an employment apocalypse, Frey made clear that their study should not be taken to mean the end of work.[23] In a retrospective (published in 2019) on the ensuing debate, The Economist referred to him as "an accidental doom-monger" and pointed out that Frey is in fact much more optimistic than he had been made out to be.[24] Reflecting on their 2013 paper in the light of the wave of Generative AI, Frey and Osborne revisited their earlier assessments in an article titled "Generative AI and the Future of Work: A Reappraisal."[25] They concluded that while generative AI has expanded the scope for automation, its primary effect is democratizing expertise, enabling more people to perform knowledge work with less training.
The economics bibliographic database IDEAS/RePEc ranks him among the top 0.5% of economists under a number of criteria.[26]
Books
The Technology Trap
In 2019, Frey published The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (Princeton University Press). The book compares the British Industrial Revolution with the computer revolution, arguing that technological change can raise overall prosperity while producing concentrated gains and worker displacement. Frey goes on to argue that the reason why the Industrial Revolution first happened in Britain was that governments there were the first to side with inventors and industrialists, and vigorously repressed any worker resistance to mechanisation. In continental Europe (and in China), in contrast, worker resistance was successful, which Frey suggests helps explain why economic growth there was slow to take off. Luddite efforts to avoid the short-term disruption associated with a new technology, can end up denying access to its long-term benefits—something Frey calls a "technology trap".[27] Writing in The New York Times, Talking Heads singer David Byrne called it "the last great book I've read".[28]
How Progress Ends
In 2025, Frey published How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press). Drawing on historical case studies, it examines how institutions, culture, and technological change interact to produce periods of growth and stagnation. Frey argues that decentralised systems tend to be better at frontier innovation, while more centralised bureaucracies can be effective at scaling and catch-up, and he applies this framework to recent economic trends in the United States and China.[29]
Book reviews
- Review of How Progress Ends by Barry Eichengreen in Foreign Affairs
- Review of How Progress Ends by Tej Parikh in the Financial Times
- Review of How Progress Ends by Marc Levinson in The Wall Street Journal
- Review of How Progress Ends by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times
- Review of The Technology Trap by Joel Mokyr in The Journal of Economic History
- Review of The Technology Trap by Alexander J. Field in EH.net (Economic History Association)
- Review of The Technology Trap by John Thornhill in the Financial Times
Selected articles
- Frey, C. B., & Presidente, G. (2024). Privacy regulation and firm performance: Estimating the GDPR effect globally. Economic Inquiry, 62(3), 1074-1089.
- Lin, Y., Frey, C. B., & Wu, L. (2023). Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas. Nature, 623(7989), 987-991.
- Chen, C., Frey, C. B., & Presidente, G. (2023). Disease and democracy: Political regimes and countries responsiveness to COVID-19. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 212, 290-299.
- Frey, C. B., Berger, T., & Chen, C. (2018). Political machinery: did robots swing the 2016 US presidential election?. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 34(3), 418-442.
- Berger, T., Chen, C., & Frey, C. B. (2018). Drivers of disruption? Estimating the Uber effect. European Economic Review, 110, 197-210.
- Berger, T., & Frey, C. B. (2016). Did the Computer Revolution shift the fortunes of US cities? Technology shocks and the geography of new jobs. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 57, 38-45.
Journalism
- Frey, C. B. (2025, December 5). Don't fear the AI bubble bursting. The New York Times.
- Frey, C. B. (2025). How America outcompeted Japan. Foreign Affairs.
- Frey, C. B. (2025, November). The AI bubble's shaky maths. Project Syndicate.
- Frey, C. B. (2025, September). How the battle for control could crush AI's promise. IMF Finance & Development.
- Frey, C. B. (2025, August 19). The 1970s gave us industrial decline. A.I. could bring something worse. The New York Times.
- Frey, C. B. (2025, May 27). Want to destroy American business? Protect it. The Economist.
- Frey, C. B. (2025). AI alone cannot solve the productivity puzzle. Financial Times.
- Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2023, September 18). How AI benefits lower-skilled workers. The Economist.
- Frey, C. B. (2019, October 24). The high cost of impeding automation. The Wall Street Journal.
Videos
Honours
- Finalist for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award (How Progress Ends)
- Finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize (How Progress Ends)
- Winner of the 2026 PROSE Awards in the Social Sciences: Economics category (How Progress Ends)
- A Financial Times Best Books of 2025 selected by Martin Wolf (How Progress Ends)
- Winner of Princeton University's Richard A. Lester Prize (The Technology Trap)
- A Financial Times Best Books of 2019 selected by John Thornhill (The Technology Trap)