Amid fashionable prophesies of technological nirvana or artificial superintelligence, actual data portend global economic decline. So contends Carl Benedikt Frey’s How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations. It makes a detailed case that we are headed not toward a “singularity,” where humanity merges with machines, or a robot utopia, in which androids take over menial labor, but a “productivity plateau” and economic slump.

Why might this be, asks Frey, a historian, economist, and associate professor of A.I. and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute. How Progress Ends has been featured as a “book of the year” in Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and numerous other prestigious outlets. It is a unique and exhaustive history of human progress and its possible decline.

Frey quotes economic Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr: “[M]ost societies that have been technologically creative have been so for relatively short periods…. It is as if technological creativity was like a torch too hot to hold for long.” From there, Frey argues that to escape this dynamic and keep the innovation going, global commerce—perhaps even the dreaded “globalism”—remains vital. Prosperity requires economic change and disruption that span across borders. The evidence shows that mercantilism and protectionism (i.e.,