Carl Benedikt Frey
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Carl Benedikt Frey is a Swedish-German economist and economic historian. He is Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at Oxford University where he directs the programme on the Future of Work at the
Oxford Martin School The Oxford Martin School is a research and policy unit based in the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford. It was founded in June 2005 as the James Martin 21st Century School and is located in the original building of the Indian I ...
.


Career

After studying economics, history and management at Lund University, Frey completed his PhD at the
Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (german: Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb) is a Munich, Germany, based research institute, which is part of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, which mana ...
in 2011. He subsequently joined the Oxford Martin School where he founded the programme on the Future of Work with support from
Citigroup Citigroup Inc. or Citi (Style (visual arts), stylized as citi) is an American multinational investment banking, investment bank and financial services corporation headquartered in New York City. The company was formed by the merger of banking ...
. Between 2012 and 2014, he was teaching at the Department of Economic History at Lund University. In 2012, Frey became an Economics Associate of
Nuffield College Nuffield College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is a graduate college and specialises in the social sciences, particularly economics, politics and sociology. Nuffield is one of Oxford's newer co ...
and Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, both University of Oxford. He remains a Senior Fellow of the Department of Economic History at Lund University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). In 2019, he joined the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on th
New Economic Agenda
as well as the
Bretton Woods Committee The Bretton Woods Committee is an American organization created in 1983 as a result of the agreement between U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Fowler, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Charls Walker – at the time a Democrat and a R ...
. And in 2020, he became a member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) – a multistakeholder initiative to guide the responsible development and use of AI, hosted by the OECD.


Research

In 2013, Frey, together with Oxford professor Michael Osborne, co-authored “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization”, estimating that 47% of jobs are at risk of automation. With over 10,000 citations according to Google Scholar, the study’s methodology has been used by President
Barack Obama's Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
Council of Economic Advisors, the
Bank of England The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694 to act as the English Government's banker, and still one of the bankers for the Government of ...
, the World Bank, as well as a popular risk-prediction tool by the BBC. In 2019, it was debated on HBO's ''
Last Week Tonight A last is a mechanical form shaped like a human foot. It is used by Shoemaking, shoemakers and cordwainers in the manufacture and repair of shoes. Lasts typically come in pairs and have been made from various materials, including hardwoods, cas ...
'' with
John Oliver John William Oliver (born 23 April 1977) is a British-American comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. Oliver started his career as a stand-up comedian in the United Kingdom. He came to wider attention ...
. The Frey and Osborne study has often been taken to imply an employment apocalypse. For example,
Yuval Noah Harari Yuval Noah Harari ( he, יובל נח הררי ; born 1976) is an Israeli historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the popular science bestsellers '' Sapiens: A Brief History ...
, Kai-Fu Lee,
Richard David Precht Richard David Precht (; born 8 December 1964) is a German philosopher and author of successful popular science books about philosophical issues. He hosts the TV show " Precht" on ZDF. He is an honorary professor of philosophy at the Leuphana ...
and Martin Ford have argued that societies need to prepare for a jobless future, citing Frey and Osborne. However, this is not what the study actually suggests. In an interview with Martin Wolf, Frey made clear that their study should not be taken to mean the end of work. In a recent retrospective 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. The economics bibliographic database IDEAS/ RePEc ranks him among the top 5% of economists under a number of criteria.


The Technology Trap

In 2019, Frey publishe
''The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation''
Comparing the British Industrial Revolution to the Computer Revolution, he argues that the long-run benefits of both events have been immense and indisputable. However, many of those who lived through these massive economic upheavals were not among its main beneficiaries. The Luddites, who smashed machines in the nineteenth century were right in thinking that modern industry reduced their utility. 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. The army that was sent out against the Luddites, for example, was larger than the army Wellington took against Napoleon in the Peninsula War of 1808. 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”. Frey also argues that much of today’s political and economic polarisation has to do with technology. The central concern that runs through The Technology Trap is that, unless we are very careful, our latest technological revolution may well turn out to be a tumultuous rerun of the Industrial Revolution, with dire social and political consequences. “The message of this book is that we have been here before,” writes Frey. An opinion poll by the Pew Research Centre survey in 2017 found that 85 per cent of US respondents favoured policies to restrict the rise of the robots.


Reviews

The book has been lauded by several publications such as '' The Economist'' and '' The Guardian'', and was selected as a '' Financial Times'' Best Books of the Year in 2019. Economic historians have also praised it. Niall Ferguson called it "of vital importance to voters and policy-makers alike.” Writing in ''
Project Syndicate Project Syndicate is an international media organization that publishes and syndicates commentary and analysis on a variety of global topics. All opinion pieces are published on the ''Project Syndicate'' website, but are also distributed to a wi ...
'', Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider called it "a historical odyssey." In a review in '' The Journal of Economic History'',
Joel Mokyr Joel Mokyr (born 26 July 1946) is a Netherlands-born American-Israeli economic historian. He is a professor of economics and history at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1974; in 1994 he was named the Robert H. Strotz Professor o ...
of Northwestern University called it “an erudite, thoughtful ndimportant book that economic historians should read.” However, he also called into question how much economists can learn about the present by studying the history of technology. In another review published by the Economic History Association
Alexander J. Field
wrote that "Frey has written an important and timely book... Many works of this nature, which attempt to cover centuries, indeed millennia of economic history, as well as look into the future, end up being superficial and often error-ridden. On these dimensions the book is largely if not entirely an exception. A great deal of effort, thought, and scholarship went into its writing, and it shows. There is much food for thought here.”


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Frey, Carol Benedikt Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Economic historians Swedish economists