Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobel

We interrupt your usual programming to bring a short reflection on some wonderful news.Among today’s winners of the Nobel prize in Economics1 is Joel Mokyr, the professor at Northwestern whose name is indelibly associated with the primacy of innovation to modern economic growth – the gradual, sustained, and unprecedented improvement in living standards that first Britain, and then country after country, have enjoyed over the past few hundred years. It was reading Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy ...