Joel Mokyr

Joel Mokyr. Photo courtesy of Northwestern U.

Since the work of Robert Solow, economists have understood that innovation is the driver of long-run economic growth. But explaining innovation—that is, explaining why some societies at some points in time are more innovative than others—has proven a formidable challenge. Mokyr’s co-winners were awarded the prize for their theoretical and empirical work relating innovation to industrial structure. In contrast, Mokyr’s contributions were historical, an accomplishment for which he won half of the overall Nobel monetary award. He explicated his main arguments in a series of groundbreaking books from The Lever of Riches (1990) through to A Culture of Growth (2016).

Early Work

Mokyr began his career as a conventional economic historian. At Yale, he did his Ph.D. under William Parker, who was influential in developing cliometrics—the application of economic theory and quantitative methods to economic history. Mokyr’s dissertation on economic growth in the Netherlands was in this tradition. His most important early contribution was, on the Irish famine. Why Ireland Starved (1983) remains the foundational cliometric treatment of the relationship between landownership, low productivity, population, and Ireland’s vulnerability to famine. During the 1980s, Mokyr wrote a series of important articles on the British Industrial Revolution and took on a series of important leadership roles within his field, notably as the editor of the Journal of Economic History.

Origins of Sustained Growth

With his breakthrough 1990 book, The Lever of Riches, Mokyr began the research on innovation that would culminate in his Nobel Prize. The Lever of Riches is a highly accessible history of technology from antiquity through the Second Industrial Revolution (1850-1914.) In it Mokyr linked the history of technology to the fundamental issue in economic history: the origins of sustained economic growth.

As well as providing a detailed narrative history of invention, this book also introduced important concepts and ideas to the history of innovation. Mokyr distinguished between macro-inventions and micro-inventions. By the former, he meant what we often call general purpose technologies such as the printing press or the internet. Macro-inventions can be truly transformative but it typically takes many decades for their full impact to be felt. Moreover, macro-inventions are potentially sterile unless complemented by a stream of micro-inventions: small improvements and cost savings that improve the initial technology and allow it to be disseminated on a broad basis. The macro-invention of the internal combustion engine and the automobile required many complementary improvements (for example, rubber tires) to ultimately bring about the transformation in transportation that took place by the early 20th century.

Mokyr’s insight was that a lone genius inventor, such as a Leonardo da Vinci, could not on his own have much impact on the history of technology and growth. Many of da Vinci’s designs were feasible but, lacking either complementary micro-inventions or craftsmen and mechanics capable of implementing his ideas, they were neglected by his contemporaries. This emphasis on innovation as a collective rather than individual achievement would become an important theme in Mokyr’s later work.

Prescriptive vs. Propositional Knowledge

In subsequent books, Mokyr returned to this topic. His 2002 book, The Gifts of Athena, distinguished between propositional and prescriptive knowledge. Prescriptive knowledge is know-how or “recipes” for how to do things, often based on practical experience and trial and error. Knowledge of this sort is tacit and can be passed from master to apprentice, which is how most human inventions probably came about historically. But prescriptive knowledge can run into dead ends as it does not show why a particular technology or process works. Propositional knowledge—understanding why something works—then becomes key to understanding the “invention of invention” (Mokyr’s term) or the development of cumulative innovation and sustained economic growth.

Many of the innovations of the British Industrial Revolution rested on prescriptive knowledge. Consider the spinning jenny, a breakout innovation of the period. Its inventor, James Hargreaves, was a tinkerer who made small mechanical improvements to the system of rollers that enabled multiple spindles to be connected together. This did not rest on broader scientific principles or propositional knowledge. However, without such breakthroughs in propositional knowledge, Mokyr argued, the First Industrial Revolution would have been a one-off burst in innovation rather than marking the transition to a new growth regime.

Shared Intellectual Culture and the Republic of Letters

Mokyr laid out the agenda that would result in A Culture of Growth in a 2005 article in the Journal of Economic History, “The intellectual origins of modern economic growth.” In this article and in the subsequent book, Mokyr traced the origins of the Industrial Revolution back to the 17th century. The startling pace of innovation in industries like cotton textiles and steam engines in the late 18th century came out of a particular intellectual and cultural milieu. This milieu was characterized by a widespread belief in progress and in the possibility of improvement as well as an appreciation for the mathematical principles that made the natural world explicable. It also had important institutional foundations such as domestic peace and rule of law.

Mokyr also emphasizes the importance of what he calls the Industrial Enlightenment—the idea that knowledge elites and practical businessmen shared a common intellectual culture. His most novel insight was his emphasis on institutions that supported this collective learning. The most important of these was the “Republic of Letters,” an informal network that emerged in the 17th century linking together scientists and intellectuals across Europe. This was a transnational and transreligious community of scholars that drew its membership from scientists, physicians, philosophers, and mathematicians, as well as from theologians, astrologers, and mystical and occultist writers. Not all the ideas produced by these thinkers turned out to be productive. Some ideas such as Descartes’ plenism (the denial of the possibility of a vacuum) were incorrect. But, as Mokyr notes, the Republic of Letters functioned as a meta-institution capable of filtering out defective ideas and arguments.

As Mokyr writes, modern economic growth involves a tremendous increase in the collective knowledge of a society. Yet, at the same time, it is not necessarily true that any one person knows more than his or her ancestors knew prior to the onset of modern growth. Rather there is both greater specialization and greater coordination. What Mokyr shows in A Culture of Growth and also in his 2009 magnum opus on the British Industrial Revolution, The Enlightened Economy, is that the 17th and 18th centuries saw the development of organizations and institutions that supported the growth of useful knowledge at the collective or societal level, while simultaneously reducing the access costs for practical businessmen or engineers who wished to use this knowledge to make money.

Mokyr notes at many points in his work that his emphasis on ideas and culture does not rule out an important role for institutions. Indeed, he views his work as being in the institutional tradition of Douglass North and others. Europe’s Republic of Letters rested on institutional foundations, such as Europe’s diverse and highly fragmented state system, its continent-spanning postal system, and its long tradition of self-government and independent cities.

Conclusion

Previous Nobel Prizes were often awarded for a few breakthrough papers, Mokyr’s prize reflects a lifetime of thought and scholarship on the origins of economic growth. As well as telling the story of the origins of innovation in a number of books, he has contributed much to the specialist economic history literatures for Ireland, the Low Countries, and Britain. Mokyr has also long been interested in the question of the Great Divergence between Europe and China. His most recent book, Two Paths to Prosperity, with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini (2025), reflects this concern. Finally, Mokyr has been a mentor and role model for many economic historians. He has supervised more than 65 doctoral students and his influence extends even more widely than this number indicates.

Mokyr’s Backgound

Mokyr was born in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1946, into a Dutch-Jewish family that had survived the Holocaust. In 1955, he emigrated to Israel with his mother, growing up in Haifa. He earned his B.A. in economics and history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968, and his Ph.D. (1974) in economics from Yale University. Mokyr joined Northwestern University as an assistant professor in 1974 and has remained there ever since, holding the Robert H. Strotz Professorship of Arts and Sciences. He also holds a position at Tel Aviv University. He was co-editor of the Journal of Economic History from 1994 to 1998). He was president of the Economic History Association from 2002 to 2003. Among his many honors, he received the Heineken Prize for History (2006) and the Balzan Prize for Economic History (2015), and was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association (2018).

Selected Works by Joel Mokyr

1976. Industrialization in the Low Countries, 1795-1850. New Haven: Yale University Press.

1977. “Demand vs. Supply in the Industrial Revolution.” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 37, No. 4, December, pp. 981-1008.

1983. Why Ireland Starved: An Analytical and Quantitative Study of Irish Poverty, 1800-1851. London: George Allen and Unwin.

1990. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. New York: Oxford University Press.

1992. “Technological Inertia in Economic History.” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 52, No. 2, June, pp. 325-338.

1993. (ed.) The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press. Revised edition, 1998.

2002. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2005. “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth.” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 2, June, pp. 285-351.

2005. “Long-term Economic Growth and the History of Technology.” In Philippe Aghion and Steven Durlauf, eds., Handbook of Economic Growth. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 1113-1180.

2009. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850. London: Yale University Press, 2009.

2014. “Precocious Albion: A New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution.” (co-authored with Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda) Annual Review of Economics, Vol. 6, pp. 363-391.

2016. A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2023. “The Mechanics of the Industrial Revolution.” (co-authored with Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda) Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 131, Issue 1.

2025. (co-authored with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini) Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1200-2000. Princeton: Princeton University Press.