PERSON
Joel Mokyr
The economic historian who gave the Industrial Revolution its deepest explanation—2025 Nobel laureate in Economics, theorist of the Industrial Enlightenment, and the clearest voice on why AI is not a tool but a channel, and why the institutions that surround the channel will determine everything about who benefits from it.
Joel Mokyr has spent more than four decades asking why some societies achieve sustained economic growth and others do not, and arriving at an answer that neither the left nor the right finds entirely comfortable: the decisive variable is not natural resources, not geography, not even technology, but the
cost of access to useful knowledge—the friction between what a society knows and what it can do with what it knows. His career-defining distinction between
propositional knowledge (knowing
that) and prescriptive knowledge (knowing
how), and his account of the
Industrial Enlightenment as the transformation that reduced the cost of converting the former into the latter, illuminate the AI moment with a precision no purely technical analysis can match. When the Royal Swedish Academy awarded him the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, it noted explicitly that his framework predicts AI could reinforce the feedback