File:Professor_Joel_Mokyr.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
Joel Mokyr
Sign in to saveAmerican-Israeli economic historian
OverviewAI-generated
Joel Mokyr is an economic historian, economist, and university teacher born in Leiden on July 26, 1946. He holds citizenship in both Israel and the United States. His academic career includes employment at Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Yale University and was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Mokyr’s notable works include *The invention of enterprise*, *Twenty-Five Centuries of Technological Change*, *British Industrial Revolution*, and *Two Paths to Prosperity*. He has received several honors, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Balzan Prize, and the Clarivate Citation Laureates. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Avner Greif is listed as his doctoral student.
Synthesized by Vinony from 32 facts across 8 sources: Wikidata, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, Crossref, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 26 July 1946
- Works
- 31
Top works
- The invention of enterprise
- כלכלה במבחן הזמן
- Twenty-Five Centuries of Technological Change
- British Industrial Revolution
- Two Paths to Prosperity
via Open Library + Wikidata
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 8
- Total plays
- 120
<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Joel+Mokyr">Read more on Last.fm</a>
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biology
· 2000 · cited 36,863x
- SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python
· 2020 · cited 36,397x
- QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing data
· 2010 · cited 30,937x
- Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
· 2015 · cited 23,703x
- Optical Coherence Tomography
· 1991 · cited 11,101x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “As Hooykaas (1972, p. 101) argued, the pervasiveness of religion meant that for any idea to become socially acceptable, it made a huge difference whether it was resisted, tolerated, or sponsored by prevalent religious beliefs.”
- “Hooykaas (1972, p. 100) writes that especially commercial and industrial cities were intellectually dynamic, far more so than sleepy university towns. These cities also tended to be more tolerant of different religions and multilingual. Modern research has found that especially cities involved in Atlantic trade were institutionally dynamic.”
- “The physical and social environment is important in determining the actions of individuals, although it is not solely responsible for the outcome.”
- “Economists have traditionally been leery at mentalités as a factor in long-term economic development. In the budding literature on the economic rise of the West, such factors have been ignored or curtly dismissed. In the past, economists’ hostility to religious factors stems from the incompleteness of such theories. Attitudes were a matter of degree, not of absolutes.”
- “If England led the rest of the world in the Industrial Revolution, it was despite, not because of her formal education system.”
- “What made the West successful was neither capitalism, nor science, nor an historical accident such as a favourable geography. Instead, political and mental diversity combined to create an ever changing panorama of technologically creative societies.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Key facts
- Born
- Joel Michael Mokyr , ( 1946-07-26 ) 26 July 1946 (age 79) , Leiden , Netherlands
- Citizenship
- American Israeli
- Awards
- Heineken Award for History (2006), Balzan Prize (2015), Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2025)
- Education
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem ( BA ), Yale University ( MPhil , PhD )
- Thesis
- Industrial Growth and Stagnation in the Low Countries, 1800–1850 (1974)
- Discipline
- Economic history
- Institutions
- Northwestern University
- Doctoral students
- Avner Greif , Ran Abramitzky, Mauricio Drelichman, Marlous van Waijenburg
- Main interests
- Economic history of Europe
- Influenced
- Cormac Ó Gráda
via Wikipedia infobox
Nobel Prize
- The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel2025
“for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”
Shared · 1/2 portion
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Joel
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- United States
- Place of birth
- Leiden
- Occupation
- economic historian
- Educated at
- Yale University
- Employer
- Tel Aviv University
- Languages spoken
- Hebrew
- Academic degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Field of work
- economic history
- Image
- Joel Mokyr.png
Show 4 more facts
- date of birth
- 1946-07-26
- member of
- Econometric Society
- Commons category
- Joel Mokyr
- name in native language
- Joel Mokyr
Sources (7)
via Wikidata · CC0
~8 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Joel Mokyr (Hebrew: יואל מוקיר; born 26 July 1946) is an American and Israeli economic historian and the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. He is also a senior adjunct professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University. He was awarded half a share of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2025 "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress."
Early life and education
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Joel Mokyr” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.