Joel Mokyr

Economic historian at Northwestern University and a 2025 Nobel laureate in Economics. Mokyr is best known for his work on the intellectual origins of the Industrial Revolution — in particular the idea of ‘useful knowledge’ and the culture of growth that let Europe turn scientific insight into sustained material improvement. His latest book, Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000, co-written with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini, compares how Europe’s corporations and China’s clans organised the production of local public goods, and traces the long divergence that followed.

In the wiki

• Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth — Conversations with Tyler: the corporations-versus-clans thesis, the Catholic Church’s role in dissolving European kinship, why China wanted stability rather than growth, the missing concept of progress in Rome and China, and the roots of British human capital during the Industrial Revolution

See also

• Tyler Cowen — host
• Joseph Henrich — parallel account of the Catholic Church weakening European kinship and producing WEIRD psychology
• Brad DeLong
• Brad DeLong on Intellectual and Technical Progress
• Adam Tooze
• Claudia Goldin
• Claudia Goldin on the Economics of Inequality