1. Joel Mokyr was born on 26 July 1946 and is a Dutch-born American-Israeli economic historian who has been a professor of economics and history and the Robert H Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University since 1994.
11 Facts About Joel Mokyr
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Joel Mokyr received a BA in economics and history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968.
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Joel Mokyr was an acting instructor at Yale University between 1972 and 1973, and became an assistant professor at Northwestern University in 1974, where he has remained ever since.
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Joel Mokyr has been the editor-in-chief of the Princeton Economic History of the Western World since 1993, and was a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History from 1994 to 1998.
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Joel Mokyr was President of the Economic History Association from 2002 to 2003.
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Joel Mokyr was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, and was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2011.
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Joel Mokyr was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, whose biennial Heineken Award for History he received in 2006.
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Joel Mokyr won the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history.
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Joel Mokyr posits that the Industrial Revolution was the result of culture and institutions.
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Joel Mokyr argues that the root of modernity is in "the emergence of a belief in the usefulness of progress", and that "it was a turning point when intellectuals started to conceive of knowledge as cumulative".
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Joel Mokyr furthermore argues that political fragmentation made it possible for heterodox ideas to thrive, as entrepreneurs, innovators, ideologues, and heretics could easily flee to a neighbouring state in the event that the one state would try to suppress their ideas and activities.