Why Did So Many Inventions Come from Europe? ~ Joel Mokyr (Great Divergence #2)

Several inventions mark the progress towards modernity - the Gutenberg printing press, the Galileo telescope, the Watt steam engine. But why was Europe the birthplace of so many of these?

Joel Mokyr, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, thinks the cause was culture. For decades he has asked economists to take intellectual history more seriously. Economies are shaped by new inventions, Mokyr argues, and inventions can only be understood when we understand the culture that gives rise to them.

But how much did Europe's culture shape its economy? And how to square early modern Europe's progressive culture with it's colonial legacy? Mokyr answers these and other questions in this episodes, finishing with his reflections on the future of technological progress.

Enjoy!

LINKS AND REFERENCES

Do you prefer reading to listening? You can find⁠ a summarised essay ⁠of this conversation, with a bibliography, at our series page: ⁠https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/

GREAT DIVERGENCE: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

This episode is part of a series produced by Warwick University’s⁠⁠ ⁠CAGE Research Centre⁠⁠⁠ in collaboration with⁠⁠ ⁠On Humans⁠⁠, searching for explanations to why Western Europe and North America emerged as the most affluent and technologically advanced regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology.

1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (Kenneth Pomeranz)

2 | Why did so many inventions come from Europe? (with Joel Mokyr)

3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)

4 | A view from the East: China, Japan, and the other paths to prosperity (Debin Ma)

5 | The big picture: Measuring the origins of the modern world (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)

NAMES MENTIONED

Joel Mokyr | Robert Lucas | David Hume | Isaac Newton | Antoine Lavoisier | Joseph Black | James Watt | John Robison | Josiah Wedgwood | Sadi Carnot | Margaret Jacob | Evangelista Torricelli | Galileo Galilei | Blaise Pascal | Otto von Guericke | Aristotle | Denis Diderot | William Harvey | Song Yingxing | Marco Polo | Zheng He | Louis XIV | Avner Greif | Guido Tabellini | Kenneth Pomeranz | Adam Smith | Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot | Montesquieu | Voltaire | Confucius | al-Ghazali | Ptolemy | Euclid | David Ricardo | Karl Marx | Hippocrates | Galen | Xi Jinping | Joseph Needham | Nigel Farage | Joseph Stalin | Trofim Lysenko | Robert Allen

KEYWORDS

Economics | History | Global Economic History | Intellectual History | Age of Inventions | Rise of the West | European Miracle | Enlightened Economy | Culture of Growth | Gift of Athena |Industrial Revolution | History of technology | History of inventions

INFO

Guest: Joel Mokyr (⁠⁠⁠Northwestern University)⁠⁠⁠

Host: Ilari Mäkelä

Contact: ⁠⁠⁠greatdivergencepod@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠

Music by Aleksey Chistilin (Lexin_Music) ⁠⁠via Pixabay