Joel Mokyr was born on 26 July 1946 and is a Netherlands-born American-Israeli economic historian.
10 Facts About Joel Mokyr
2.
Joel Mokyr is a professor of economics and history at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1974; in 1994 he was named the Robert H Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences.
3.
Joel Mokyr is a Sackler Professorial Fellow at the University of Tel Aviv's Eitan Berglas School of Economics.
4.
Joel Mokyr's father died of cancer when Mokyr was one year old, so he was raised by his mother in Haifa, Israel.
5.
Joel Mokyr continues to serve as editor-in-chief of a book series published by Princeton University Press, The Princeton University Press Economic History of the Western World.
6.
Joel Mokyr became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.
7.
Joel Mokyr won the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history.
8.
Joel Mokyr posits that the Industrial Revolution was the result of culture and institutions.
9.
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".
10.
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.