What makes Joel Mokyr great

His Nobel is a triumph for history and the importance of ideas

Notes on Progress What makes Joel Mokyr great His Nobel is a triumph for history and the importance of ideas Anton Howes and Works in Progress Oct 13, 2025 360 27 68 Share Among today’s winners of the Nobel prize in Economics is Joel Mokyr, the professor at Northwestern whose name is indelibly associated with the primacy of innovation to modern economic growth – the gradual, sustained, and unprecedented improvement in living standards that first Britain, and then country after country, have enjoyed over the past few hundred years. Speaking for myself, it was reading Mokyr’s The Enlightened Eco

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