Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion And peter howittThe Nobel Prize Committee stated that the award was deserved “to identify the conditions necessary for sustained development through technological progress”.
The Nobel Prize Committee summarizes his major contributions as follows:
Over the past two centuries, for the first time in history, the world has seen sustained economic growth. It has lifted large numbers of people out of poverty and laid the foundation for our prosperity. This year’s laureates in Economic Sciences, Joel Mokyr, Philip Aghion and Peter Howitt explain how innovation provides the impetus for further progress.
Technology is advancing rapidly and affecting us all, with new products and production methods replacing old products and production methods in a never-ending cycle. It is the basis for sustained economic growth, resulting in improved standards of living, health and quality of life for people around the world.
However, this was not always the case. Quite the contrary – stagnation was the norm for most of human history. Despite repeated important discoveries, which sometimes improved living conditions and increased incomes, development always ultimately stagnated.
Joel Mokyr uses historical sources as a means to uncover the reasons why continuous development has become the new normal. He demonstrated that if innovations are to succeed each other in a self-producing process, we not only need to know that something works, but we also need a scientific explanation for it. The latter were often lacking before the Industrial Revolution, making it difficult to build on new discoveries and inventions. He also stressed the importance of society being open to new ideas and allowing change.
Philip Aghion and Peter Howitt also studied the mechanisms behind continued evolution. In a 1992 article, he constructed a mathematical model for creative destruction: when a new and improved product enters the market, companies selling the old product suffer losses. Innovation represents something new and is therefore creative. However, it is also destructive, because a company whose technology becomes useless is eliminated from competition.
In different ways, the award winners show how creative destruction creates conflict that must be managed creatively. Otherwise, innovation will be blocked by established companies and interest groups, risking losses.
There is more detailed scientific information Here,
Marginal Revolution cites an insightful quote from Joel Mokyr’s The Levers of Riches.
Yet the central message of this book is clearly not optimistic. History provides us with relatively few examples of societies that were technologically progressive. In this respect our own world is exceptional, though not unique. Overall, the forces opposing technological progress have been stronger than the forces striving for change. The study of technological progress is therefore the study of exceptionalism, of cases in which, as a result of rare circumstances, the normal tendency of society to move toward stability and equilibrium was broken. The unprecedented prosperity enjoyed by a large section of humanity today has arisen from contingent factors to a greater extent than is generally anticipated. Moreover, technological progress is like a delicate and weak plant, whose nutrition depends not only on suitable surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short. It is highly sensitive to the social and economic environment and can be easily disrupted by relatively small external changes. If there is any lesson to be learned from the history of technology it is that Schumpeterian growth, like other forms of economic development, cannot and should not be taken lightly.
You can find a lot of coverage on the web. Congratulations to the doctors. Mokir, Aghion And howitt,
