The prize was awarded for explaining the mechanisms of innovative economic growth. Mokyr received half of the prize, amounting to 5.5 million Swedish kronor, for identifying the prerequisites for sustainable growth through technological progress. Aghion and Howitt shared the other half of the prize for their theory of sustainable growth through creative destruction.

According to the Nobel Committee’s statement, for the first time in history, the last two centuries have witnessed sustainable economic growth, which has helped a vast number of people escape poverty and become the foundation of modern prosperity. This year’s laureates explained how innovations become the impulse for further progress.

Joel Mokyr: From the Holocaust to Scientific Pinnacles

Joel Mokyr is 79 years old. He was born in Leiden, Netherlands, to Dutch Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. His father died when he was a year old, and his mother moved him to Israel, where he grew up in Haifa.

In 1968, Mokyr earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He then continued his education in the USA: in 1972, he received a master’s degree in economics from Yale University, and in 1974, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the same university.

Since 1994, Mokyr has held the position of professor of economics and history at Northwestern University in the USA. Since 2001, he has also been teaching at the School of Economics at Tel Aviv University, maintaining close ties with the Israeli academic community.

Breakthrough Research on the Origins of Prosperity

Mokyr’s scientific work focuses on studying the cultural and institutional roots of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. He concluded that the most important prerequisite for modernization was not government measures or even the free market, but culture and institutions.

He considers the cultural root of modernization to be the emergence of belief in the possibility and usefulness of progress, and the institutional root – the political fragmentation of medieval Europe combined with a unified intellectual space created by the Catholic Church. This combination favored the emergence and development of new ideas, entrepreneurship, and innovations.

New idea generators could escape persecution by fleeing to another country – an option that was not available, for example, in unitary China, which significantly outpaced Europe in technological development during the early Middle Ages.

Mokyr summarized his research findings in the book “The Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy,” published in 2016. Reviewers highly praised this work, and many already then called it worthy of the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee recommends this work to anyone who wants to better understand the modern world.

The Nobel Committee notes that Mokyr demonstrated that for innovations to follow one another in a self-generating process, we need not only to know that something works but also to have scientific explanations of why it is so.

Israelis – Nobel Prize Laureates

Joel Mokyr has become the 14th Israeli to receive the Nobel Prize. As of 2024, 13 Israeli citizens have received the Nobel Prize: three laureates in the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, one in literature, six in chemistry, and three peace prizes.

Here is the complete list of Israeli Nobel laureates:

Literature:

• 1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon – for deeply original narrative art with motifs from Jewish folk tradition

Peace Prize:

• 1978 – Menachem Begin – for preparing and concluding a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt
• 1994 – Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres – for efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East

Economics:

• 2002 – Daniel Kahneman – for applying psychological insights to economic science, especially in the analysis of judgment and decision-making under uncertainty
• 2005 – Robert Aumann – for enhancing our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis
• 2021 – Joshua Angrist – for methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships
• 2025 – Joel Mokyr – for identifying the prerequisites for sustainable growth through technological progress

Chemistry:

• 2004 – Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover – for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation
• 2009 – Ada Yonath – for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome
• 2011 – Dan Shechtman – for the discovery of quasicrystals
• 2013 – Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt – for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems

Israel has more Nobel Prizes per capita than the USA, France, and Germany. Considering that the Jewish state was only established in 1948, and the prizes have been awarded since 1901, this is indeed an outstanding achievement, demonstrating the high level of Israeli science and education.

Joel Mokyr’s victory in 2025 is not only a personal triumph for the distinguished scientist but also another confirmation that Israel remains one of the world’s centers of scientific thought and innovation.