How Joel Mokyr's insights could guide India's quest for prosperity

We need an 'enlightenment' fostered by innovation-oriented institutions and a new social contract

- ADITYA SINHA

The 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences has brought innovation to the centre of the global growth debate. The award committee split the award between two distinct but connected visions of progress: Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt were honoured for formalizing a theory of growth through creative destruction, while Joel Mokyr received the other half for uncovering the historical and institutional roots of sustained technological progress. Let's focus on Mokyr's work because it explains why innovation happens and how it endures.

Mokyr's lifelong project has been to answer a deceptively simple question: why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Europe and why did it last? His answer, developed across The Lever of Riches (1990) and The Gifts of Athena (2002) fundamentally reshaped our understanding of economic history. In The Lever of Riches, Mokyr drew a sharp distinction between propositional knowledge, the theoretical 'know why' of science, and prescriptive knowledge, the practical 'know how' of engineering and craftsmanship. These two streams have mostly existed in isolation.

The modern age began when these spheres finally converged, creating self-reinforcing feedback loops between discovery and application. In