Joel Mokyr, Nobel Prize winner in economics

"[...] For having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress." The three laureates have focused their attention on the technological change that leads to sustained economic growth. Joel Mokyr has investigated the conditions that fostered the explosion of creativity and technological innovation that led to the Industrial Revolution and that has fueled a continuous flow of innovations ever since. In the early stages—the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century—the decisive factor was the convergence of skilled workers, knowledgeable in their trades and driven to improve the efficiency of their work, and highly educated people—many of whom were aristocrats or descendants of aristocrats—with a passion for observing how things worked. The former deployed what he calls "prescriptive knowledge," and the latter what he calls "propositional knowledge" (we could call it "practical" and "theoretical"), and they paid attention to each other across many societies, of practitioners or of scholars, but all interested in knowing how everything worked and why, or because. The interaction of both types of knowledge was the great "miracle" of knowledge and growth in 18th-century Britain. This is what he has called "the Enlightenment economy," and on which he has published extraordinary books for more than three decades.