Israeli American economic historian
Joel Mokyr (born 26 July 1946) is a Dutch-born American-Israeli economic historian who has served as a professor of economics and history and as the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University since 1994.[4] Since 2001, he has also served as the Sackler Professorial Fellow at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University.[4]
Early life and education
Mokyr was born in Leiden in 1946, into a family of Dutch Jews who had survived the Holocaust.[5] His father, a civil servant, died of cancer when Mokyr was one year old, and so he was raised by his mother in Haifa, Israel.[5] He received a BA in economics and history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968.[4] He received an MPhil in economics from Yale University in 1972, and a PhD in economics from Yale in 1974, writing a dissertation titled Industrial Growth and Stagnation in the Low Countries, 1800-1850 under the supervision of William N. Parker, Lloyd G. Reynolds, and John C.H. Fei.[6]
Career
Mokyr was an acting instructor at Yale University between 1972 and 1973, and became an assistant professor at Northwestern University in 1974, where he has remained ever since.[5] Since then, he has chair or co-chaired over 50 doctoral student theses.[7] He has been the editor-in-chief of the Princeton Economic History of the Western World (a book series published by Princeton University Press) since 1993, and was a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History from 1994 to 1998.[4] He was President of the Economic History Association from 2002 to 2003.[4]
Mokyr was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, and was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2011.[4][8][9] He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, whose biennial Heineken Award for History he received in 2006.[10][11] He won the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history.[12]
Research
Industrial Revolution
Mokyr posits that the Industrial Revolution was the result of culture and institutions.[13] He argues that the root of modernity is in "the emergence of a belief in the usefulness of progress", and that "it was a turning point when intellectuals started to conceive of knowledge as cumulative".[14]
Mokyr furthermore argues that political fragmentation (the presence of a large number of European states) made it possible for heterodox ideas to thrive, as entrepreneurs, innovators, ideologues, and heretics could easily flee to a neighbouring state in the event that the one state would try to suppress their ideas and activities. This is what set Europe apart from the technologically advanced, large unitary empires such as China and India. China had both a printing press and movable type, and India had similar levels of scientific and technological achievement as Europe in 1700, yet the Industrial Revolution would occur in Europe, not China or India. In Europe, political fragmentation was coupled with an "integrated market for ideas" where Europe's intellectuals used the lingua franca of Latin, had a shared intellectual basis in Europe's classical heritage and the pan-European institution of the Republic of Letters.[15]
A Culture of Growth
Mokyr presents his explanations for the Industrial Revolution in the 2016 book A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. The book has received positive reviews. Deirdre McCloskey described it as a "brilliant book... It’s long, but consistently interesting, even witty. It sustains interest right down to page 337... The book is not beach reading. But you will finish it impressively learned about how we got to where we are in the modern world."[16] In her review, McCloskey furthermore lauded Mokyr as a "Nobel-worthy economic scientist".[16]
In a review published in Nature, Brad DeLong found that while he favored other explanations for the Industrial Revolution, "I would not be greatly surprised if I were wrong, and Mokyr's brief...turned out to be the most broadly correct analysis...A Culture of Growth is certainly making me rethink."[17]
Cambridge economic historian Victoria Bateman wrote, "In pointing to growth-boosting factors that go beyond either the state or the market, Mokyr's book is very welcome. It could also feed into discussions about the scientific community post-Brexit. By reviving the focus on culture it will, however, prove controversial, particularly among economists."[18] An article in The Economist pointed out that a fine definitional distinction had to be considered between “culture as ideas, socially learned” and “culture as inheritance transmitted genetically”.[19] The book has also been reviewed favorably by Diane Coyle,[20] Peer Vries,[21] Mark Koyama,[22] Enrico Spolaore,[23] and The Economist.[24] Geoffrey Hodgson criticized the book for placing "too much explanatory weight" on "too few extraordinary people."[25]
Resistance to new technologies
Mokyr outlined three reasons why societies resist new technologies:
- Incumbents who fear a threat to their power and economic rents
- Concern about broader social and political repercussions ("unintended ripple effects")
- Risk and loss aversion: new technologies often have "unanticipated and unknowable consequences"
"These three motives often merge and create powerful forces that use political power and persuasion to thwart innovations. As a result, technological progress does not follow a linear and neat trajectory. It is, as social constructionists have been trying to tell us for decades, a profoundly political process."[26]
