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A Culture of Growth
Mokyr's 2016 treatise tracing the cultural and intellectual conditions — open science, Baconian faith in useful knowledge, the Republic of Letters — that made the Industrial Revolution possible.
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton University Press, 2016) is Joel Mokyr's most ambitious historical argument — a four-hundred-page explanation of why sustained economic growth began in Europe rather than elsewhere, and why it began in the eighteenth century rather than earlier. The book's answer, developed across extensive historical and quantitative evidence, is that a specific cultural configuration — what Mokyr calls the 'culture of growth' — emerged in early modern Europe and made possible the institutional innovations that we now recognize as the Industrial Enlightenment. The book synthesized Mokyr's four decades of research into a unified account of how cultural frameworks determine institutional possibilities, and how institutional possibilities determine technological outcomes.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's most important contribution was bringing cultural analysis into economic history with rigor. Mokyr argued that material and institutional explanations of the Industrial Revolution — coal, colonies, property rights — are necessary but not sufficient.