An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.
What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.
Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.
As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.
Press conference: https://www.youtube.com/live/EajZObplJ8U
https://www.reuters.com/world/mokyr-aghion-howitt-win-2025-n... - includes quotes from press conference, including commentary from laureates on present geopolitical climate
But technological progress can be understood as successively more sophisticated ways of capturing and directing energy from natural processes. Economic growth has always occurred downstream of technologies that extract more energy or increase efficiency. Sheep, horses, windmills, coal, oil, nuclear ... etc.
Metrics like kWh per capita might become more interesting as the understanding of energy/growth matures. Or externally added energy (by electricity, oil, and fertiliser) per calorie of food.
To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. Electrification of transport (bc low thermodynamic efficiency of combustion engines) is an example of how we are doing this.
So even if technology continues to develop, unless efficiency grows faster than energy sources wane, there will only be economic degrowth.
Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP
> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe.
> However, this was not always the case. Quite the opposite – stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history. Despite important discoveries now and again, which sometimes led to improved living conditions and higher incomes, growth always eventually levelled off.
...
since the end of the 19th century...
Am I missing something?
How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.
Neo-Malthusianism is as bunk as Malthusianism was
...to produce the same output. Growth requires greater output though.
Just look at the timeline of energy consumption [0]. Either you're wrong and innovation requires more resources, or you're right and there's no direct relation between innovation and overall resource usage.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
We've probably yet to even come close to that eden-like experience.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071014012248/http://www.theloc...
Sure, it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation, and it wasn't established by Alfred Nobel himself. Nobody cares. Value of such awards depends entirely on peer recognition, not on who pays or what exact labels they carry. Selection for economics is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, like the other science awards.
And those who pay the piper call the tune.
Hence the brand of 'economics' that gets the gong.
"Nobody cares" gotcha. Greed never cares.
Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables.
When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...
Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.
When models fail, physicist adjust hypotheses ...
Supposing it did was fairly predictable that not setting money on fire would help recovery, what does it matter that there is no controlled scientific experiment involved? Or to put it another way, are there no facts to be gleaned from data?
You're deflecting. Curtailing inflation was an outcome of policy. The U.S. had fuck-all to do with it. Unless you're willing to acknowledge something so basic there's nothing else to say to someone disinterested in good faith discussion
EDIT: apparently not. I would rather you explain to me why than downvote mindlessly.
> concensus in Economics
That's what I was talking about. This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank. To the point that there are people like you who feel they should defend them against the evil "authoritarian Socialist", because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism. I sincerly hope you consider broadening your horizons, maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
And if you're going to claim that economists are publishing influential papers in other fields - and especially if you're claiming that they're doing so in an unprecedented way, with no inter-disciplinary collaboration - please provide some examples. And if you're thinking of Freakonomics, know that no researcher takes Freakonomics seriously, and neither should you.
As for sociologists "invading" economics, they sort of are. Economics and sociology have quite a bit of overlap, and researchers from the two fields often collaborate. And any group researching economic phenomena, even an inter-disciplinary one involving sociologists, would be identified as economists, not sociologists, by people reading their work. Although David Graeber, an anthropologist, did write an excellent book on economic phenomena in "Debt: the first 5000 years", and it has done quite well. You could say that it's "influential".
Unfortunately, neoclassical economics also has wide political support among the people it benefits: wealthy people and institutions, e.g. banks. Which also means they get bankrolled (hah) much more than other social scientists, which means they get preferential treatment. E.g., this very "Nobel prize" in economy that this theead is about is funded by a bank.
The force to change economics qould have to come from within economics, perhaps from behavioural economics, or new Keynesian economics (the first one seems more promising), or even from movements like degrowth or circular economics. You can't expect a sociologist to fix a different field, and that wasn't the point. The point was simply that sociology doesn't suffer this embarassment because they are not burdened by ideological pressure backed by monies interest.
Fun fact: The neoclassical economic school managed to remove the word "political" from "political economy" at the turn of the 20th century.
The other solution would he some equivilent of a community note for it every year, it seems like things work as is though.
oh spare me. Social sciences are inherently political. They've always been political and they will always be political. Denying merely makes it worse. that's how you end up with the racialist anthropology of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Don't hang a picture of a dog turd on your front door and cry about all the people pointing it out.
I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.
Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?
No space in 2025 for any such considerations.
[1] Case in point: I just read a news piece announcing that an 85 year old café in downtown Lisbon will be closed down to make way to yet another generic gentrified """brunch place""" for tourists. The regulars, many of them elderly and for whom the friendly place was basically a living room to help stave off lonelyness; many of them working people used to stopping by for fresh bread and a chat on their way home from work, are dismayed of course. But it's more "economically efficient" to cater to tourist jerkoffs and sell them the same overpriced egg on croissant that they can have in any large city in the world...
It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.
Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?
Barro also has an old undergrad macro text which is good
The gap between undergrad macro and professional macro is extremely large. That shouldn’t dissuade you it’s just a note.
There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias.
Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/
Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."
Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.
By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SG8IGOzeF49Pbf8JZ-JWyzPq...
We lose 10 million sq miles of forests a year and have lost 1/3 of forest areas since 1000Ad, so "reforesting" isn't a viable reversal project.
And reforestation is poorly understood as "reforesting" is pursued on land already lost to forest capability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59799-8
"Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity"
Reforestation might not solve our issues, but I don't see "nonsense."
“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald
That's folk science, what Donald is describing (he admit this in Origins of the Modern Mind).
Remember that the causal framework must be evaded to reach scientific correlations, where multiple contradictions can lead to knowledge. Myth and history were addictive hiccups that trapped humans in way simplistic explanations.
We evade this "plain English" silliness, like economics, or go bust.
You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel any better.
In real life, it may mean that people feel that, though you state your points as though they are obviously true, you have given no reason for us to actually agree with your dogmatic assertions. That doesn't prove that economics is a primate bias; it proves that you are not doing well at persuading people.
Growth is not necessary but provides benefits. A country that grows improves its quality of life. Extreme poverty levels have been plumetting for decades because of said growth ( mostly represented in China and India). The poorest countries trade the least.
Economics today is mostly about data. For instance tariffs lead to worse outcomes for consumers; only populists like them. Or, compare housing affordability between areas with lax zoning or strict zoning. Just because data isn't gleaned from a physics experiment doesn't mean it isn't useful; more than likely you probably invoked social science research data to support a POV that wasn't a controlled experiment; was that all in fact nil in value? The facts don't matter, or rather, there are no facts and only ideology exists? That must be why communists twist themselves over "is" and "ought"
Until we move to measurement (ie analog) rather than binary statistics (which is still merely a project based in counting, yes, 1,2,3) then we are totally informationally emasculated.
That tells me nothing about your perspective. Your ideology is as identifiable as anyone else's and you have to do politics like anyone else.
> economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping
It's not up to you. Economics has a definition.
> richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Wealth.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing. The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate
That said, this is still a super prestigious award.