Prof Rohith Jyotish of Jindal University offers a nuanced perspective on the 2025 economics Nobel Prize in TheIndiaForum:
—The evolution of growth theory, from Robert Solow’s initial models to the insights of Paul Romer and the creative destruction concept by Aghion and Howitt, reflects a transformative understanding of how ideas can drive economic dynamism.
—Joel Mokyr’s historical analysis emphasises the cultural and institutional factors that have enabled sustained innovation, challenging the notion that progress is solely a product of economic mechanics.
—Contemporary growth theories often neglect the historical and social contexts of innovation, revealing a tension between the ideals of progress and the realities of inequality and dispossession.
On Mokyr:
Mokyr’s Europe is a civilisation intoxicated with improvement. From Francis Bacon’s vision of science as the handmaiden of utility to the transnational “Republic of Letters”, he traces the rise of a culture that prized openness, debate, and practical experimentation. The Industrial Revolution, in Mokyr’s retelling, was as much a moral project as a mechanical one. Progress depended less on capital or conquest than on a collective faith that knowledge, once freed from dogma, would generate material plenty.
It is a deeply persuasive story and one that fits neatly with the models of endogenous growth. Mokyr provides the longue durée prelude that Aghion and Howitt’s equations assume but cannot describe. The cultural conditions that make innovation continuous.
Yet that very harmony invites reflection. The world Mokyr reconstructs is an idealised Europe, a republic of reason unshadowed by the colonial and extractive circuits that sustained it—the Atlantic slave economies, the plunder of Asian trade, the appropriation of raw materials and labour from distant colonies that fed the very industries he celebrates. His “useful knowledge” is an Enlightenment without empire. What remains unexamined is how the same faith in improvement travelled through conquest, slavery, and resource drain, linking the optimism of the metropole to the dispossession of the periphery. If Mokyr gave the Enlightenment a narrative of origins, Oded Galor offered growth theory its narrative of destiny.
Further:
What all these frameworks share—from Romer’s endogenous growth to Galor’s unified history—is a faith that innovation arises from within the system itself. Once the right incentives and institutions are in place, progress unfolds as an internal dynamic. But from the vantage of the periphery, innovation has never been an internal property. It has always been a relation of dependence.
Political economists of development and technology have long show that the ability to innovate is conditioned by a nation’s position in the global hierarchy of production. Scholars of late industrialisation—from Alice Amsden and Ha-Joon Chang to Linsu Kim and Keun Lee—demonstrated that the most successful “latecomers” did not simply liberalise markets or wait for creative destruction to work its magic (Amsden 2001; Chang 2002; Kim 1997; Lee 2019). They built capabilities deliberately by protecting infant industries, reverse-engineering imported technology, using state finance to buy learning time.
…..It forgets that every technological frontier rests on externalised costs: the cotton that fed Manchester’s mills, the cobalt that powers electric cars, and the data extracted from billions of users to train AI systems. What appears as self-sustaining innovation is, in practice, a continuing transfer of value and risk from the margins to the centre.
