Questions about Joel Mokyr
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What did Joel Mokyr win the Nobel Prize for?
Joel Mokyr was awarded half of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2025 for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress. The Nobel committee credited him with demonstrating that innovations can only succeed one another in a self-generating process when people have scientific explanations for why things work, not just knowledge that they work. The other half of the prize went to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt.
What is Joel Mokyr's book A Culture of Growth about?
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, published in 2016, presents Mokyr's explanation for why the Industrial Revolution occurred, arguing that cultural factors, specifically ideas that are socially learned, were central prerequisites. The 337-page book was reviewed favorably by Deirdre McCloskey, Brad DeLong in Nature, Diane Coyle, Foreign Affairs, The Independent, and the Journal of Economic Literature, though Geoffrey Hodgson criticized it for placing too much explanatory weight on too few extraordinary people.
Where did Joel Mokyr grow up and study?
Joel Mokyr was born in Leiden, Netherlands in 1946 and immigrated to Israel in 1955, growing up in Haifa. He completed a B.A. in economics and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968, then earned an M.Phil. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1974, both in economics from Yale University.
What is Joel Mokyr's academic position at Northwestern University?
Joel Mokyr holds the Robert H. Strotz Professorship of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, where he has been a faculty member since 1974. He is also a senior adjunct professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University.
What major awards has Joel Mokyr received before the Nobel Prize?
Before the 2025 Nobel, Mokyr received the Heineken Award for History from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, the Balzan International Prize for economic history in 2015, election as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2018, and designation as a Clarivate Citation laureate in Economic Sciences in 2021. He is also a foreign member of the British Academy and the Accademia dei Lincei.
What was Joel Mokyr's doctoral dissertation about?
Mokyr's doctoral dissertation, completed at Yale in 1974, was titled Industrial Growth and Stagnation in the Low Countries, 1800-1850. A revised version was published by Yale University Press in 1976.