Joel Mokyr and the Cities Where Useful Knowledge Travels
On October 13, 2025, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to the economic historian Joel Mokyr. The recorded motivation is short enough to quote in full: the prize recognised him "for having explained innovation-driven economic growth," and in its longer form, "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress." Read slowly, that is an unusual sentence for an economics award. It does not credit a model, a dataset or a single invention. It credits an account of conditions — of what has to be true about a society before technology keeps improving year after year. For a publication interested in people who move between cities, the citation reads almost like an invitation. Knowledge does not diffuse on its own; it travels with workers, teachers, correspondents and migrants, through the dense places where they happen to meet.
A prize citation that points at knowledge, not machines
The documented facts of the award are compact. The award year is 2025, the date awarded is October 13, 2025, and the category is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Mokyr's recorded portion of the prize is one half. The top-line motivation credits him with having explained innovation-driven economic growth, while the fuller motivation specifies the identification of the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress.
Prize wording is drafted with care, and the choice of "prerequisites" rather than "causes" or "mechanisms" is worth noticing. A prerequisite is something that must already be in place. It shifts attention away from the moment of invention and towards the surrounding conditions — who is allowed to experiment, who can read what an experimenter wrote, and whether a useful method survives its inventor.
What "prerequisites for sustained growth" actually asks
The distinction that the citation's language implies — and this is editorial reading rather than official text — is between a clever device and a continuing process. Societies have produced remarkable one-off inventions for millennia without producing compounding growth. What changes in the cases economic historians find most interesting is not the brilliance of individuals but the durability of the channels through which their findings move: printed manuals, apprenticeships, learned societies, competing workshops, letters between people who never meet.
Framed that way, "sustained" carries as much weight as "growth." Sustained progress through technology requires that each improvement be legible enough for someone else to copy, adapt and improve again. The prize motivation credits Mokyr with identifying those prerequisites; the specific historical arguments behind that judgement belong to his published scholarship rather than to the award record.
Leiden to Evanston to Tel Aviv: a career lived between cities
The biographical record attached to the award is itself a small map of urban academic life. Mokyr was born on July 26, 1946, in Leiden, the Netherlands. At the time of the award, his listed institutional affiliations were Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in the United States, and the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel.
A dual affiliation across two continents is a common enough arrangement in academic economics that it rarely attracts comment. But it describes a particular kind of working life: terms and seminars in one city, colleagues and archives in another, ideas carried back and forth by the person rather than by an institution. Scholars who study how knowledge circulates are often, by the shape of their own careers, part of that circulation.
Why cities keep showing up in stories of useful knowledge
If the prerequisites for sustained technological progress are social rather than mechanical, cities are where those prerequisites tend to accumulate. This is analysis rather than a claim drawn from the award record, but the logic is straightforward: density lowers the cost of finding the one person who already solved your problem. A port, a university quarter and a manufacturing district within walking distance of one another create the accidental encounters that no plan can schedule.
Cities also preserve knowledge in ways individuals cannot. When an artisan dies, a guild, a school or a printing house may retain the method. When one workshop closes, its trained hands walk to another. Migration between urban centres — the movement that this publication documents in ordinary working lives — is one of the oldest transmission technologies we have, and it operates on the same principle whether the cargo is a weaving technique or a research programme.
What the official record does and does not tell us
It is worth being precise about the limits of the documentary basis here. The award record establishes the category, the 2025 award year, the October 13 award date, the motivation wording, a recorded portion of one half, a total prize amount listed as 11,000,000, and the institutional affiliations noted at the time. Those are firm facts.
What such a record cannot supply is the substance of the scholarship: the case studies, the archival evidence, the arguments about which societies sustained technological progress and why. Readers who want that will find it in Mokyr's own books and papers rather than in any summary of an award. What the citation does offer is a usable frame — one sentence suggesting that lasting technological growth depends on conditions that let useful knowledge move, and that those conditions have usually been built in cities, by people travelling between them.
Nobel Prize API