Joel Mokyr

Joel Mokyr: Why the Machines Never Stopped Coming

On the morning of the 2025 Nobel announcement, a 79-year-old economic historian in Evanston, Illinois, opened his laptop to find out who had won. "I actually went to my computer to see who won the Nobel Prize this year, out of curiosity," Joel Mokyr said afterwards. "And I get an email saying congratulations." He had half of it, for work answering a question that had defeated the field for a century: not why the Industrial Revolution happened, but why — uniquely in human history — it did not stop.

Leiden, Haifa, New Haven

Mokyr was born on 26 July 1946 in Leiden, in the Netherlands, to a family of Dutch Jews who had survived the Holocaust. His father, Salomon Mok, died when Joel was one year old. In 1955 the family moved to Israel, and he grew up in Haifa. Seven decades later he is still fluent in Dutch, a small persistence that turns out to matter: his first serious work was on the industrialisation of the Low Countries.

He took his B.A. in economics and history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968, then went to Yale for a master's in 1972 and a doctorate in economics in 1974. The dissertation became his first book, *Industrialization in the Low Countries, 1795–1850*, published in 1976.

He arrived at Northwestern University in 1974 and never left. Fifty years on he holds the Robert H. Strotz Professorship there, as professor of both economics and history — a dual citizenship that is the whole point of him.

The Question That Would Not Close

The territory Mokyr staked out is European economic history between roughly 1750 and 1914, and it contains the strangest event in the economic record. For most of human existence, technological improvement was episodic: a burst of cleverness, a long plateau, sometimes a regression. Then, in a corner of north-western Europe, improvement stopped being episodic and became continuous — one innovation feeding the conditions for the next, decade after decade, for two centuries and counting.

Explaining the *start* of that was a crowded field. Explaining its *persistence* was the harder problem, and it is Mokyr's.

Useful Knowledge

His answer, developed across *The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress*, *The Gifts of Athena* (2002) and *The Enlightened Economy* (2009), turns on a distinction most economists had not bothered to draw: between knowing *that* something works and knowing *why*.

Craftsmen have always known that. A smith knows how hot the iron must be; a brewer knows how long to leave the mash. Such knowledge accumulates slowly, transmitted by apprenticeship and capped by the limits of trial and error. What changed in the eighteenth century was the arrival of a growing body of scientific explanation for why things behaved as they did, and the tightening of the loop between the two — the arrangement Mokyr's work is known for calling the Industrial Enlightenment.

Once you know why a process works, you can improve it deliberately rather than by luck, and each improvement generates new questions the knowledge base can absorb. That is what converts a burst into a self-sustaining process. The Nobel Committee put his point almost in his own terms: for innovations to succeed one another in a self-generating process, "we not only need to know that something works, but we also need to have scientific explanations for why."

Three things, on his account, had to be present together: useful knowledge, the mechanical competence to build things to a tolerance, and institutions that rewarded rather than punished the people doing the improving.

A Culture of Growth

That last condition became the subject of *A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy* (2016), his most ambitious book and the one that pushed him furthest from conventional economics. Its argument is that the Industrial Revolution required a prior change in beliefs — a competitive, transnational European market for ideas in which intellectuals could disagree publicly, novelty was prestigious rather than suspect, and the authority of the ancients was no longer decisive.

Bringing culture into a growth model is a professional risk; the discipline has spent decades treating it as the residual you invoke when your variables fail. Mokyr made it a mechanism instead. Deirdre McCloskey called the book brilliant; Brad DeLong said it made him reconsider his own account of where industrialisation came from. His forthcoming *Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in China and Europe, 1000–2000* extends the comparison to the obvious control case.

Stockholm

The 2025 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences went half to Mokyr, "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress," and half jointly to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for their mathematical model of growth through creative destruction. It was a well-matched pairing: the formal machinery and the historical account of the thing the machinery describes.

The honours had been arriving for years — the Heineken Award for History in 2006, the Balzan International Prize in 2015, Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and the Elinor Ostrom Prize in 2018, a Clarivate Citation Laureate designation in 2021, fellowships of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, the Accademia dei Lincei and the Econometric Society. He served as president of the Economic History Association and edited the *Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History*. His Northwestern colleague Kevin Boyle called him "a towering figure in economic history, whose extraordinary scholarship has transformed our understanding of the modern age."

He is married to Margalit Birnbaum, a biochemistry professor at the University of Illinois Chicago; they have two daughters.

Why Joel Is Called a Genius

The intellectual quality here is synthesis at a scale almost nobody attempts. Mokyr reads the history of science, the history of technology, the archival record of British manufacturing, and the theoretical literature on growth, and he holds all four in view at once. Most scholars pick a lane, because the reading cost of not picking one is prohibitive. The Nobel citation is, read carefully, a prize for defining a problem correctly — for seeing that "why did growth begin" and "why did growth continue" are different questions with different answers, and that the second is the one that explains the modern world.

The other unusual quality is a willingness to argue for something unfashionable and be patient. Culture as a causal variable was close to disreputable in economics when he began pressing it. He did not win by polemic; he won by producing forty years of evidence.

The honest counter-case: Mokyr is a historian of ideas working in a discipline that prizes identification and causal inference, and his central claims are not testable in the way an economist normally means. Critics can reasonably say the Industrial Enlightenment thesis is a compelling narrative rather than a demonstrated cause, that Europe's "culture of growth" is partly defined by the outcome it is meant to explain, and that his account underweights coal, colonies, slavery and simple geographic luck. He is also, by his own framing, an interpreter rather than a discoverer: he found no new fact so much as a better arrangement of known ones. Whether that is genius or exceptional erudition is a fair thing to argue about — though the arrangement, in his case, changed what everyone else could see.

Legacy

Mokyr's insistence that ideas and institutions, not just capital and labour, drive growth has migrated from heresy to the centre of how development is discussed. He has also been the field's most persuasive optimist. "The last 150 years have been absolutely miraculous in the history of the human race," he has said, pointing to life expectancy: around 73 for women and 68 for men today, against the upper thirties in the 1870s. "We have doubled it." His work is, in the end, an argument that this was not an accident, and therefore not guaranteed to continue.