WORK
The Lever of Riches
Mokyr's 1990 survey of technological creativity from antiquity through the twentieth century — the book that established his reputation as the preeminent economic historian of innovation.
The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press, 1990) was Joel Mokyr's first major synthetic work, a comprehensive survey of invention from the ancient world through the mid-twentieth century. The book catalogued the cascade of technological innovations that produced modern prosperity and introduced the distinction between macro-inventions and micro-inventions that would become central to his subsequent theoretical work. The title's lever refers to Archimedes — give a creative inventor a place to stand, and the right institutional support, and he can move the economic world.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book established Mokyr's methodological signature: treating technology not as an autonomous force but as the product of specific institutional and cultural conditions, and insisting that the same technology produces radically different outcomes depending on the institutional environment into which it is deployed.
The book's most influential analytical contribution was the macro/micro distinction. Macro-inventions are radical, discontinuous breakthroughs — the steam engine, the printing press, electrification