Born to survivors
Joel Mokyr was born on 26 July 1946 in Leiden, in the Netherlands, into a family of Dutch Jews who had survived the Holocaust. The Dutch Jewish community had been almost destroyed during the German occupation, and his parents were among the few who came through it. His father, Salomon Mok, was a civil servant; he died of cancer when Joel was only a year old. His mother, Gonda Mok, born Jakobs, raised him alone.
In 1955, when he was nine, his mother emigrated with him to Israel, and he grew up in the port city of Haifa. He did his military service there and studied economics and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduating in 1968. He never lost his Dutch: decades later he still spoke it fluently, and his late brother, Rob Mok, became an advocate general in the Netherlands. The boy who began life in a country that had sent most of its Jews to their deaths would spend his career asking how societies become free, open and prosperous.
From Haifa to Yale and Northwestern
Mokyr went to the United States for graduate school, earning an M.Phil. in economics at Yale in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1974. His dissertation, on industrial growth and stagnation in the Low Countries between 1800 and 1850, asked why some places industrialised early and others lagged; Yale University Press published a revised version in 1976.
In 1974 he joined Northwestern University near Chicago as an assistant professor, and he has stayed there for more than half a century, becoming the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history. He is also a senior adjunct professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University. Along the way he became one of the great organisers of his field: he edited the Princeton Economic History of the Western World book series and the five-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (2003), co-edited the Journal of Economic History, and served as president of the Economic History Association in 2002–2003.
The big question: why did growth begin?
For almost all of human history, living standards barely changed from one generation to the next. There were brilliant inventions in ancient China, in the Islamic world and in medieval Europe, but each burst of progress eventually petered out. Then, a little over two centuries ago, starting in Britain, something new happened: growth became normal. Incomes in many countries have since risen by around one and a half to two per cent a year, a pace that doubles a person’s income over a working life and has transformed health, food, housing and communication for billions of people.
Mokyr spent his career on the question of why. His early work looked at industrialisation in the Low Countries and at the Great Irish Famine, in a book titled Why Ireland Starved. In The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress he surveyed technological change across many centuries and civilisations. In The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (2002) and The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 (2009) he built the argument for which he is best known, and in A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (2016) he traced its roots back into the intellectual life of early modern Europe.
Knowing why, not just knowing how
Mokyr’s answer centres on what he calls useful knowledge, which has two parts. One is prescriptive knowledge: recipes, techniques, drawings and instructions that tell you how to do something. The other is propositional knowledge: systematic understanding of the natural world that explains why something works. Before the Industrial Revolution, he showed, most innovation rested on prescriptive knowledge alone. People knew that a technique worked but not why, so it was hard to improve, and much effort was wasted on dead ends such as perpetual-motion machines or alchemy.
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment changed that. Scientists began insisting on precise measurement, controlled experiments and results that others could reproduce, and they published what they found. A growing culture of open exchange, which Mokyr links to the cross-border Republic of Letters, meant that discoveries were shared rather than hoarded. Practical inventors could draw on scientific explanation, and their machines in turn raised new scientific questions. The Nobel committee pointed to examples such as the steam engine, improved through new understanding of atmospheric pressure and vacuums, and steelmaking, improved once chemists understood how oxygen removes carbon from molten iron. Once these two kinds of knowledge fed each other, Mokyr argued, innovation became a self-sustaining process instead of a one-off event.
Artisans, openness and the courage to change
Ideas alone were not enough. Mokyr stressed that Britain led partly because it had a large supply of skilled artisans and engineers who could read a design and turn it into a working, commercial product. Without that practical and commercial know-how, even brilliant ideas stay on paper, like Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of flying machines.
Just as important, a society has to be willing to let new technology replace old ways. Innovation creates losers as well as winners, and those whose privileges or livelihoods are threatened often fight back. Mokyr argued that one of the Enlightenment’s great gifts was a broader acceptance of change, and that institutions such as the British Parliament made it harder for entrenched interests to block progress and easier for groups to strike compromises. In his most recent book, Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1200–2000 (2025), written with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini, he and his co-authors compare how culture and institutions shaped very different paths to growth.
Why it matters today
Mokyr’s work is history with a warning label. The Nobel committee drew the lesson plainly: sustained growth cannot be taken for granted, and stagnation, not progress, has been the human norm. The threats he identifies are recognisable today: limits on academic freedom, knowledge kept inside national or regional silos instead of shared globally, and powerful groups blocking new technologies that threaten them. Governments, universities and research funders who argue for open science, international scientific cooperation and support for both basic research and practical engineering skills are, knowingly or not, making Mokyr’s case.
His ideas also speak to new technologies. The committee noted his view that artificial intelligence could strengthen the feedback between scientific understanding and practical technique, speeding up the growth of useful knowledge. And on the side effects of growth, from pollution to antibiotic resistance, Mokyr has argued that technology can often be self-correcting, because problems prompt the search for solutions, while recognising that this frequently requires well-designed public policy.
Nobel Prize and other honours
In October 2025 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Mokyr half of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress.” The other half went to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for their theory of growth through creative destruction; together the three were honoured for explaining innovation-driven economic growth.
By then he had collected many of the highest honours in his discipline: election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, foreign membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and its Heineken Prize for History in 2006, the Balzan Prize for economic history in 2015, and foreign membership of the British Academy and the Accademia dei Lincei. In 2026 the Carnegie Corporation of New York named him one of its Great Immigrants.
A Jewish story of survival and migration
Mokyr’s life traces some of the central journeys of twentieth-century Jewish history. He was born to Holocaust survivors in a country whose Jewish population had been largely murdered, grew up as an immigrant child in the young State of Israel, and built his career in the United States. He has kept close ties to Israel through Tel Aviv University, and he co-edited, with Anita Ofer, a two-volume Hebrew collection on economic history published by the Open University of Israel.
He has spoken of his own immigrant experience as part of what he values in America. In a 2026 convocation speech at Northwestern he described the country as a collection of hundreds of ethnicities, religions and languages, and said that this is what makes it American. It is a fitting view for a scholar whose work argues that societies flourish when ideas and people can move and mix freely.
The man and his legacy
Mokyr is married to Margalit Mokyr, born Birnbaum, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Illinois Chicago; they have two daughters. He is an enthusiastic listener of Kol Hamusica, Israel’s classical music radio station, and he has taught at Northwestern for more than fifty years and written more than a hundred articles and books.
His legacy is a clear account of where modern prosperity came from and what could end it. Reviewers from Deirdre McCloskey to Brad DeLong took his arguments seriously even when they favoured other explanations, and some critics have argued that he gives too much weight to a small number of exceptional thinkers. But his central claim has become part of how economists and policymakers think: the wealth of the modern world rests on knowledge that is explained, shared and put to work, and on societies brave enough to let it change them.
Sources & further reading
Joel Mokyr, Wikipedia · Popular information: From stagnation to sustained growth, NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2025, NobelPrize.org · Joel Mokyr, 2026 Great Immigrants, Carnegie · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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