Joel Mokyr

Origins and early life

Joel Mokyr was born in Leiden, in the Netherlands, on 26 July 1946, and spent his first nine years in Utrecht, in the centre of the country. His parents, Salomon Mok and Gonda Jacobs, were Dutch Jews who had survived the Theresienstadt camp, and his father died in 1948, when Joel was a year old. In 1955 his mother took him and his sister to Israel, where he grew up in Haifa, finished high school and did his military service before reading economics and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduating in 1968.

Work and career

He took his doctorate at Yale in 1974 with a thesis on industrial growth and stagnation in the Low Countries, and that year joined Northwestern University, in Evanston, where he has taught for over fifty years. A historian of the European economy between 1750 and 1914, he published Why Ireland Starved in 1983, The Lever of Riches in 1990, The Gifts of Athena in 2002, The Enlightened Economy in 2009 and A Culture of Growth in 2016.

His central argument is that growth became self-sustaining only when knowledge of what works met scientific explanations of why it works, in a European culture open to new ideas, where craftsmen could build what scholars understood.

Recognition

He has been a professorial fellow at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics of Tel Aviv University since 2001, received the Heineken Prize for History in 2006 and the Balzan Prize for economic history in 2015, and has supervised over sixty-five doctorates. In 2025 he received one half of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”, the other half going to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt.

At the banquet in Stockholm on 10 December 2025 he spoke for all three laureates, paying tribute to Joseph Schumpeter, who described creative destruction but did not live to see an economics prize.