- Person
- Joel Mokyr
- Lived
- b. 1946
- Field
- Economic history
- From
- Dutch-born Israeli-American
The story
Joel Mokyr was born in Leiden in 1946 to Dutch Jews who had survived the Holocaust, grew up in Haifa, and has taught at Northwestern University since 1974. His life’s question was simple to state and hard to answer: why, after thousands of years in which living standards barely changed, did economic growth suddenly become normal about two centuries ago?
Earlier civilisations had made brilliant inventions, but each burst of progress eventually stopped. Mokyr argued that the difference lay in what he calls useful knowledge. Prescriptive knowledge tells you how to do something: a recipe, a technique, a drawing. Propositional knowledge explains why it works. Before the Industrial Revolution, innovation rested mostly on the first kind, so people knew that something worked but not why, and improvements came slowly and haphazardly. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment brought precise measurement, controlled experiments and the open publication of results. Scientific explanation began to guide inventors, and inventors’ machines raised new scientific questions. Better understanding of atmospheric pressure improved the steam engine; understanding how oxygen removes carbon from molten iron improved steelmaking.
Mokyr added two further conditions. Ideas had to be turned into products by skilled artisans and engineers, of whom Britain had many. And society had to accept change, because every new technology creates losers who try to block it. Institutions that let interest groups bargain instead of veto, he argued, removed a major barrier to growth.
He set out these ideas in books including The Gifts of Athena (2002), The Enlightened Economy (2009) and A Culture of Growth (2016). In 2025 he received half of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for identifying the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress. The committee drew a warning from his work: growth cannot be taken for granted, and it is threatened by restrictions on academic freedom, by knowledge kept in national silos, and by powerful groups who block change.
Why it matters
Mokyr’s work gives governments and universities a clear case for open science, international scientific exchange and support for both research and practical skills, the foundations of the rising living standards billions of people now enjoy.
About Joel Mokyr
Economic historian, born in Leiden to Holocaust survivors, who showed that modern growth began when useful knowledge was shared openly in societies willing to change. Nobel 2025.
Sources
- Popular information: From stagnation to sustained growth NobelPrize.org
- Joel Mokyr Wikipedia
- Joel Mokyr, 2026 Great Immigrants Carnegie
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.