Joel Mokyr’s Nobel shows a path towards economics’ holy grail: A profession’s history viewed through the lens of its most famous prize (David Walker 20 October 2025, Inside Story)
[H[e has devoted his career to answering one of economics’ central puzzles: how do we promote productivity and economic growth? How do we build the incomes of entire populations and whole generations?
Mokyr’s answer to the prosperity puzzle is that the flow of new ideas must keep adding to our stock of useful knowledge. Importantly, prosperity will only take off if it can build on itself in a sort of virtuous spiral. And you need to generate not one but two different forms of knowledge:
- propositional knowledge, such as empirical studies, which tells people how things are; and
- prescriptive knowledge, such as written instructions, which tells people how to get things done.
Finally, for all that knowledge accumulation to happen, you need a particular form of culture — one that is open to spreading knowledge broadly, to the possibility that knowledge will change, and to the idea that people will apply this knowledge.