Joel Mokyr

Early life and education

Joel Mokyr was born in 1946 in Leiden, Netherlands, to a Dutch Jewish family that had endured the Holocaust. His father, Salomon Mok, worked as a civil servant and died of cancer when Mokyr was a year old. In 1955, he moved to Israel with his mother, Gonda Mok (born Jakobs), and was raised in Haifa.

He completed a bachelor’s degree in economics and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968. He went on to earn a master’s in economics from Yale University in 1972, followed by a doctorate in economics from Yale in 1974. His doctoral work, published as a book by Yale University Press in 1976, examined industrial growth and stagnation in the Low Countries from 1800 to 1850.

Career

Joel Mokyr began his academic career as an acting instructor at Yale University in the early 1970s. He joined Northwestern University as an assistant professor in 1974 and has been there ever since. He has served as editor-in-chief for the Princeton Economic History of the Western World series and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and was a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. Mokyr was also President of the Economic History Association from 2002 to 2003.

A Culture of Growth

In his 2016 book A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Mokyr presents his explanations for the Industrial Revolution. The book received positive reviews. Deirdre McCloskey described it as a brilliant, consistently interesting, and witty book that sustains interest to page 337, and lauded Mokyr as Nobel-worthy. Brad DeLong, writing in Nature, stated that while he favored other explanations, he would not be surprised if Mokyr's analysis turned out to be the most broadly correct, and that the book made him rethink.

Victoria Bateman noted that the book's focus on growth-boosting factors beyond the state or market was welcome but that reviving the focus on culture would prove controversial among economists. The Economist pointed out a definitional distinction between culture as socially learned ideas and culture as genetically transmitted inheritance. The book was also reviewed favorably by Diane Coyle, Foreign Affairs, The Independent, and the Journal of Economic Literature. Geoffrey Hodgson criticized it for placing too much explanatory weight on too few extraordinary people.

Honours and awards

Mokyr's honors began with election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. He became a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2011. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him a foreign member in 2001, and he received its Heineken Award for History five years later. He also holds foreign memberships in the British Academy and the Accademia dei Lincei.

The Balzan International Prize for economic history was awarded to him in 2015. In 2018 the American Economic Association named him a Distinguished Fellow, and in 2021 he was a Clarivate Citation laureate. Half of the 2025 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences went to Mokyr. The committee recognized his work showing that for innovations to sustain themselves, scientific explanations for why something works are essential.

Did You Know?

• Mokyr is an enthusiastic listener of Israeli classical music station Kol Hamusica.
• Despite moving to Israel at age 9, he is still fluent in Dutch.
• His late brother was Rob Mok, former advocate general in the Netherlands.