The Culture Nobel

On the work of Joel Mokyr and the software of prosperity

Joel Mokyr is a renowned economic historian whose work has greatly illuminated the process by which the modern world became rich. In 2025, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences - "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress". This honour reflects Mokyr’s profound impact on our understanding of the Industrial Revolution and the broader question of why the modern world became so wealthy. For decades, Mokyr – a professor at Northwestern University – has explored the economic and intellectual roots of technological change, especially in Europe from the Enlightenment through the 19th century. In an age when many economists focused on capital, labour, or institutions, Mokyr’s research boldly put knowledge and culture at centre stage, arguing that the spread of useful ideas and a mindset valuing progress were key drivers of history’s great economic transformations.

I will focus on Mokyr's three major books that outline his main contributions and the evolution of his thinking. The common and important theme is that societies that reward curiosity, diffuse knowledge, and tolerate disruption can achieve unprecedented prosperity.

Technological Creativity as Catalyst

In The Lever of Riches (1990), Mokyr makes a clear claim: technological change was the defining feature that allowed Europe to pull ahead after the sixteenth century. Rather than attributing Europe’s rise to plunder, empire, or luck, he stresses that it was an inventive ecosystem of artisans, engineers, patrons, and a receptive public that generated a sustained stream of productivity-raising inventions. Loot and conquest could enrich states briefly; only technological creativity could compound prosperity.

Surveying classical antiquity through the early twentieth century, Mokyr notes that the ancients excelled at engineering feats yet produced few economy-wide productivity breakthroughs. Medieval Europe initially experienced a decline, followed by a recovery and acceleration of knowledge. By the late Middle Ages, innovations in agriculture, navigation, and metallurgy gathered momentum; between 1500 and 1850, the pace became very rapid. What mattered was not a single invention but the "social climate" that protected experimenters and rewarded improvement. Markets alone did not “order up” invention. New techniques and ways of doing things usually arise in irregular bursts and meet resistance from entrenched interests. What was different in Europe at the time was a political and intellectual configuration that reduced those frictions and tilted outcomes toward technological adoption.

Among the many proximate factors, Mokyr noted that what stood out was the ideology and mentality of Western Europe at the time. Early modern Europeans increasingly treated innovation as a positive-sum project, compatible with social order and moral purpose. The West’s decisive edge, in his account, was political and mental diversity. A fragmented landscape of competing states formed a marketplace for ideas. Suppression in one country often meant a welcome in another. Decentralised politics plus an open intellectual climate yielded a culture unusually hospitable to trial, error, and diffusion.

The Power of Useful Knowledge

In The Gifts of Athena (2002), Mokyr turns his attention explicitly to knowledge and why the Industrial Revolution emerged when and where it did. Mokyr distinguishes propositional knowledge (the "what" - general truths about nature) from prescriptive knowledge (the "how" - techniques and rules of thumb). Together they form a society’s stock of useful knowledge.

The Industrial Revolution, he argues, was above all a knowledge revolution. By the eighteenth century, Britain and Europe more broadly had accumulated enough theory and craft to ignite self-sustaining improvements. What was crucial was a feedback loop that linked science and practice. The problems in mines and mills spurred scientific inquiry. New scientific insights then made better engines, chemicals, and metals feasible. Mokyr calls this fusion the "Industrial Enlightenment". Incentives and prices mattered, but without the requisite epistemic base, profitable opportunities could not be exploited. Economies are constrained by what they know at any moment; Britain’s fortune was to possess a broad, shared base of both theory and know-how, along with institutions with knowledge societies, journals, patents, and correspondence networks that accelerated diffusion and cumulative learning.

Culture Matters

A Culture of Growth (2016) is perhaps Joel Mokyr's most famous book. This is where he argued that the thread that tied all of his ideas together is culture, by which he meant beliefs and values about novelty, evidence, and improvement. Between 1500 and 1800, Europe developed an ethos that encouraged dissent from received wisdom and celebrated useful knowledge. Important social and intellectual personalities like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton set the intellectual directions, but equally important "cultural entrepreneurs" like Samuel Hartlib, John Wilkins, and others. They were the ones who organised the Republic of Letters and helped to institutionalise open science. Norms of replication, proving your work over status, and analytic egalitarianism meant that good ideas could circulate and be tested.

The combination of cultural unity (a transnational learned community) and political fragmentation (many competing polities) created escape valves for heretics and competition for talent. Europe’s fragmentation was not inherently beneficial - it became so in conjunction with robust, pan-European knowledge networks. By contrast, Mokyr argues that late imperial China lacked comparable meta-institutions protecting heterodoxy, limiting the emergence of an Enlightenment-style culture of improvement despite high literacy and notable technical achievements.

The Debates

My own awareness of Joel Mokyr's came from his debate with other scholars on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution, and I believe it is in these debates that his intellectual chops were finely tuned. His bold thesis that a culture of knowledge drove the Industrial Revolution and set the tone for modern economic growth did not go unchallenged. One of his main opponents is the British economic historian, Robert Allen.

Allen proposed a rival and materialist explanation for why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain. In his view, Britain industrialised first because its economic incentives were uniquely primed for mechanisation. By the 18th century, British employers faced unusually high wages (labour was expensive) while enjoying cheap sources of energy (coal was abundant). According to Allen, this "high-wage, cheap-energy" economy made it highly profitable to develop and adopt labour-saving machines – more so in Britain than anywhere else. For example, if paying workers is costly but running a coal-fired engine is cheap, there’s a strong push for inventors to build steam engines to replace manual labour. Allen meticulously documented how British wages were indeed higher than those in France, China, or India, and how coal prices (especially near British coalfields) were low. He argued that many iconic inventions – like the spinning jenny in textiles – only became viable in Britain’s cost environment. In essence, Allen’s hypothesis is a demand-side story: innovation happened in Britain because the market rewarded it there; if British wages hadn’t been so high, the effort to invent machines might not have paid off. Allen framed his hypothesis in opposition to culture-first explanations. He provocatively suggested that if economic incentives explain the Industrial Revolution, "we don’t need to suppose that certain cultures are more inventive... we don’t need to posit ... a 'culture of growth.'" In other words, Allen implied that one could explain Britain’s breakthrough without recourse to the Enlightenment or unique British open-mindedness. Rational profit-seeking behaviour under the right incentives would do the job.

Mokyr's arguments, on the other hand, can be characterised as a supply-side theory - the capacity to innovate, rooted in a culture that rewards knowledge acquisition and innovation. His response to Allen is that pure economics is not enough. Many societies had high wages or resource pressures at times, but only Britain (and Europe) had the scientific and intellectual wherewithal to exploit those pressures. For instance, after the Black Death in the 14th century, much of Europe had high wages due to labour scarcity, yet an industrial revolution did not start then. Something was still missing. And in Mokyr’s view, that something was the Enlightenment-fueled accumulation of useful knowledge by 1700. Indeed, Mokyr tended to downplay the idea that "coal and colonies" alone caused the Industrial Revolution. He would point out that inventions like the Newcomen steam engine required scientific know-how and mechanical skill that had no equivalent in high-wage regions elsewhere. Nonetheless, Mokyr does not entirely dismiss Allen's findings. He acknowledges that Britain’s economic environment made it especially welcoming for new inventions. He just adds that Britain also had a supply of inventors and ideas ready to take advantage of that environment.

Gregory Clark, another economic historian, also grapples with the role of culture but from a very different angle than Mokyr. Clark actually shares some common ground with Mokyr in that he agrees that values and behaviour changed in the lead-up to modern growth. However, Clark is sceptical that the critical cultural shift was a sudden Enlightenment-era phenomenon or a "fashion” of ideas. He argues that the groundwork for industrial society was laid over much longer periods, possibly over centuries or millennia, through gradual evolutionary changes in people’s behaviour and even genetics. In Clark’s view, the reason the Industrial Revolution took so long (10,000 years after the invention of agriculture) is that it required more fundamental changes in human attitudes and aptitudes than a mere wave of 18th-century enthusiasm could provide.

For example, Clark points to evidence that English society by 1700 had undergone generations of "natural selection" for traits conducive to capitalism, such as patience, hard work, and lower time preference, through the mechanism of the rich having more surviving children than the poor. He suggests that by the time of the Enlightenment, the population in Britain was already, on average, more receptive to discipline, innovation, and calculated risk-taking than many other populations. Clark notes things like the medieval English being relatively market-driven and non-violent compared to more distant past societies, implying a long evolution toward working-class behaviour.

Mokyr, for his part, acknowledges long-run factors (for example, he does not deny that England’s high literacy and skills by 1700 were centuries in the making). But he resists purely deterministic or Darwinian explanations. He would point out that many societies saw gradual changes, yet only Europe broke the "Malthusian trap". To Mokyr, the content of the Enlightenment, the actual scientific and intellectual breakthroughs, matters a great deal, not just any behavioural change. The debate here touches on the intersection of culture and biology, but also on timing. Mokyr sees the 17th–18th centuries as decisive, while Clark stretches the causal timeline much further back.

Despite their different emphases, Mokyr and Clark both elevate culture against simpler economic theories, and in that sense, Clark is more of a friendly critic. Interestingly, Clark concedes that if culture is vital, then we need a theory for why culture changed when it did and why it stuck. Mokyr’s work is one attempt at such a theory (emphasising Enlightenment mechanisms), whereas Clark hints at an evolutionary theory. The debate between them highlights that even once we agree that culture matters, explaining why culture took the particular form in 18th-century England (and proving it empirically) remains a challenge.

Lessons and Legacy

In my observation, economic historians are stubbornly reticent about offering policy lessons from their scholarship. If you doubt me, then listen to the Frontier Matters episode with Sir Antony Hopkins (Paid subscription required. You can take one out here.) Perhaps because it detracts from their primary goal of understanding the past. But this has never made sense to me. History is a uniquely interdisciplinary field. Joel Mokyr's work is a fine blend of history, economics, anthropology, and sociology. A more plausible explanation for why economic historians defer policy to economists is that the world is a complex place, and history teaches you to resist simple prescriptions.

In the context of the poorer countries of the world today, the picture gets even blurrier. The world is more globalised, and ideas and technology now travel more easily than three centuries ago. Yet the diffusion of knowledge and technology has had an uneven result in developing countries. Perhaps this gives primacy to culture as the main determinant of how to seed prosperity. But as the rapid rise of some previously poor countries, and the work of Mokyr himself has shown, cultural determinism has been defied enough times for it to be an iron law.

Overall, the nagging feeling I am left with is that history does not only have to explain how cultural change happens, but we also have to pry from its clutches the secrets of how to bring about cultural change. The forward-looking lesson here is that if a society wants faster growth, then it must renew the Industrial Enlightenment’s bargain of shared knowledge, social dignity for innovators, and institutions that keep the path open to the next improvement.