The American-Israeli economic historian Joel Mokyr has been awarded one half of the 2025 special Nobel Prize for economics “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”.
Now, by rewarding particular achievements over others, the Nobel Prizes are in general guilty of rendering them seemingly more virtuous. This is at best a false virtue that props up one more axis of discrimination. For example, the science prizes (for medicine, physics, and chemistry) restrict “what counts as ‘world-changing’ science to that published in ‘high impact’ western journals, led by scientists affiliated with well-heeled European or North American institutes, and framed within the disciplinary traditions dominant in these regions,” to quote from a recent piece of mine.
This said, it’s still possible to find a kernel of indisputable facts — i.e. the high-quality scientific work itself — within this morass that still deserves to be celebrated. This year’s peace and economics prizes, for Marina Corina Machado and Mokyr respectively, have however called even this courtesy into question for their wins.
For the case against Machado, I recommend my colleague Srinivasan VR’s profile and analysis of her legacy. As for Mokyr: my principal objection is the Eurocentrism of his theory. Mokyr has attributed the Industrial Revolution to the European Enlightenment’s intellectual openness and implied that these qualities were uniquely Western. However, many scholars have reported that regions such as China and parts of South and Southeast Asia displayed comparable technological sophistication, commercial dynamism, and administrative capacity well before the 18th century — and on the back of this evidence other scholars, including the so-called ‘California School’, have objected to Mokyr’s framing.
Europe’s eventual industrial leadership wasn’t the result of cultural superiority, as Mokyr would have it, but because of specific material advantages, including those accruing from its colonial exploits and its global trade networks. Mokyr’s interpretation however risks reducing the global divergence in industrialisation to differences in cultural attitudes, downplaying the role of imperial extraction.
Equally important is the fact that this is interpretation: Mokyr’s theory isn’t empirically verified. What he has called his evidence for a self-sustaining relationship between scientific inquiry and industrial productivity is largely derived from selective readings of correspondence among intellectuals, the minutes of learned societies, and anecdotal accounts of inventors. These materials do reveal the existence of intellectual exchange but they don’t show that such exchange measurably increased productivity or the diffusion of new technologies — nor do they confirm that the regions or industries most exposed to “useful knowledge”, in his words, grew faster than those that were not.
Independent scrutiny of industrial output records, patent data, and wage histories from the 18th and the early 19th centuries has consistently come away with weak correlations, at best, between sites of scientific activity and industrial success. Britain’s early industrial centres were often driven by the availability of particular resources, entrepreneurial finance, and organised labour rather than by their proximity to experimental philosophy.
Yet Mokyr’s thesis turns a coincidental association into a mechanism of causality. His critics are right to argue that the supposed feedback loop between propositional and prescriptive knowledge remains a theoretical construct, supported by narratives and his own convictions rather than empirical proof. And now the Nobel Foundation’s endorsement has conferred to these unsubstantiated convictions the sheen of authority, and all the institutional prestige and public deference that entails.