When Joel Mokyr stepped onto the Stockholm stage to receive the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, he did more than celebrate a lifetime of scholarship. He reignited one of the oldest debates in economic history: where does technological progress truly come from? For Mokyr, the answer has always been clear, even if controversial. Innovation, he argues, is not the product of entire societies moving in unison. It is the work of a small intellectual elite, a narrow “upper tail” of human capital whose curiosity, stubbornness, and brilliance push the world forward. Progress, in his telling, is a story of outliers.
Mokyr’s vision is unapologetically asymmetric. He sees history as a long chain of breakthroughs forged by a minority of thinkers—engineers, inventors, scientists—whose ideas eventually reshape the material world. Institutions matter, but not because they democratize innovation. They matter because they protect and incentivize this elite, giving them the freedom, resources, and legitimacy to pursue ideas that most people would never imagine. In Mokyr’s world, technological revolutions begin not in factories or parliaments, but in the minds of a few individuals who refuse to accept the limits of their time.
His Nobel lecture sharpened this argument. He described a competitive marketplace of ideas, a cultural ecosystem where knowledge is exchanged, challenged, and refined until it becomes usable technology. The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century—Mokyr sees them all as moments when societies successfully nurtured their upper‑tail innovators. When the intellectual elite thrives, progress accelerates. When it is stifled, history stalls.
But as soon as Mokyr’s model was celebrated, it was also challenged. Critics argue that his story is too narrow, too focused on the exceptional few while overlooking the social, political, and economic forces that make innovation possible. They point out that technological change is rarely the work of isolated geniuses. It emerges from networks of workers, artisans, institutions, and communities whose contributions are invisible in Mokyr’s framework. The Industrial Revolution, they note, was not just the triumph of inventors—it was the product of skilled laborers, expanding markets, colonial extraction, and shifting social norms. To reduce it to an intellectual elite is to flatten history.
Others question whether Mokyr’s competitive “market for ideas” ever truly existed. The historical record, they argue, is filled with examples where innovation was shaped by power, inequality, and political agendas rather than pure intellectual competition. Knowledge did not always flow freely. It was often controlled, restricted, or weaponized. The idea that institutions simply incentivize innovators ignores the deeper dynamics of class, culture, and conflict that determine who gets to innovate in the first place.
Yet even his critics acknowledge that Mokyr has forced economists to take culture, knowledge, and intellectual life seriously as engines of growth. He has widened the lens through which we understand technological change, even if some believe he has not widened it enough. His work invites a difficult question: is progress driven by the many, or by the few? And if it is the few, what responsibilities do societies have to cultivate them?
The debate is far from settled. But in challenging the way we think about how science becomes technology, Mokyr has done what the best scholars always do—he has made the familiar strange again. He has reminded us that innovation is not inevitable, that it depends on fragile cultural and institutional arrangements, and that the future of progress may hinge on how we treat the minds at its frontier.