Modern prosperity didn’t arrive because factories suddenly sprouted; it emerged because a culture made the pursuit and sharing of useful knowledge both honorable and inevitable. In A Culture of Growth, Joel Mokyr shows how that culture formed—and why it made the modern economy possible.
If you build institutions and norms that reward open science, reputations for discovery, and the diffusion of “useful knowledge,” you get sustained innovation—and with it, the modern economy.
Mokyr marshals the Republic of Letters (a transnational “market for ideas”), Bacon and Newton as cultural entrepreneurs, the rise of open science, and Europe–China contrasts in printing, censorship, and elite–artisan links to argue that Europe’s Enlightenment culture tipped innovation into a self-sustaining process. He cites printing/output gaps (Europe vs. China), intellectual networks, early copyright/patent practices, and the increasingly public nature of knowledge as concrete mechanisms that lowered access costs and raised the returns to originality.
Best for readers who want a deep, idea-driven explanation of why growth became normal only recently—economists, historians, policy wonks, founders, and curious generalists. Not for those seeking a quick, purely “materialist” account that centers coal, colonies, or capital without culture; Mokyr insists the ideas plumbing mattered.
This article distills A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr into an integrated, evidence-anchored guide that you can read instead of (or before) the book—and still argue with confidence about the Enlightenment, the Republic of Letters, and the surprising cultural levers that powered the Industrial Revolution, the knowledge economy, and modern growth. According to Mokyr, Europe’s competitive states and its cross-border intellectual networks created an open market for ideas where reputations, priority, and public disclosure pushed science and technology forward, ultimately lowering the cost of access to knowledge and raising the upside to innovation.
Along the way, we’ll fold in recent scholarship and reporting (from the British Academy to news about Mokyr’s 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences) and contrast Europe’s path with China’s to make the mechanisms unmistakably clear.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr (Princeton University Press, 2016) is a landmark work in economic history and the history of ideas.
Mokyr—now a Nobel laureate (2025)—is a Northwestern University economic historian known for connecting technological change to the incentives and norms of knowledge production. The book sits at the intersection of intellectual history and growth theory: it isn’t just “what machines did,” it’s why societies believed making, testing, and publishing new ideas was virtuous. Across seventeen chapters, Mokyr traces how the Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters normalized useful knowledge as a public project.
Credentials: Mokyr previously authored The Gifts of Athena and The Enlightened Economy, and won the Balzan Prize (2015) and Heineken Award (2006) before the Nobel.
Mokyr’s core claim is crisp: early modern Europe developed a culture of growth—norms and institutions that rewarded discovery, openness, and reputations in a cross-border market for ideas—and that culture lowered access costs, raised incentives, and made knowledge cumulative, thereby powering the Industrial Revolution and long-run modern growth. He writes that Europe’s intellectuals increasingly treated knowledge as open-source so that “useful knowledge” could circulate and compound, turning discovery itself into a competitive game with reputational payoffs.
Mokyr threads Bacon and Newton as “cultural entrepreneurs” whose rhetoric, methods, and prestige nudged the whole system toward progress—“the growth of useful knowledge…as a critical ingredient of economic growth.”
Most of all, he argues that open science—placing discoveries “in the public realm”—was “the best guarantee for the continuous cumulative nature of…useful knowledge.” That, he suggests, is the hinge separating Europe from China in 1500–1800.
The result is a persuasive, human-driven explanation of why modern economic growth became normal rather than miraculous.
And it’s a model with lessons for today’s innovation policy.
2. Background
On October 13, 2025, Joel Mokyr shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work on innovation-driven growth, alongside Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt; reputable outlets report the committee credited Mokyr’s historical analysis of how science and culture drive long-run growth.
Before the Nobel, he received the 2015 Balzan Prize and 2006 Heineken Award for History. So the book’s author now stands at the very center of the field he helped shape.
This matters for reception and for why A Culture of Growth has aged unusually well—its mechanisms map cleanly onto today’s debates about open science and research incentives.
Keep that in mind as we turn to the substance.
Because if culture sets the rules of the game, reputations and disclosure decide how fast the game unfolds.
The British Academy has hosted Mokyr arguing that Britain’s high-skill artisans and scientific culture amplified invention—an angle consistent with the book’s emphasis on bridges between savants and fabricants (think scientists and makers).
In the book, he stresses that formal, codified knowledge and tacit know-how are complements—you need conceptual breakthroughs so tinkering doesn’t run into diminishing returns. This complementarity was embedded in institutions like learned societies, journals, and priority norms that rewarded being first—and being public. That cultural plumbing—more than coal alone—made growth self-reinforcing. It’s why we still argue about the Enlightenment as an economic event, not just a philosophical vibe.
As the BBC-produced documentary material puts it, the period “transformed the way people think, work and play forever.”
Mokyr provides the social technology explaining why.
3. A Culture of Growth Summary
The problem: for most of history, economies stagnated; then, around 1700–1850, innovation became routine and living standards rose persistently.
The mechanism: Europe created a competitive, reputational market for ideas in which being recognized for originality required publishing discoveries and convincing a transnational elite—the Republic of Letters—of their validity.
Because rulers’ power stopped at borders, thinkers could exit to more tolerant jurisdictions, increasing contestability and reducing censorship’s bite.
A cascade followed: open science, priority, copyright (1710), and patents together created incentives that made knowledge public yet rewarding to produce.
The heroes: not just inventors, but cultural entrepreneurs (notably Bacon and Newton) who marketed a new ethic of discovery and progress.
Useful knowledge became morally good—and economically central.
Part I – From beliefs to incentives. Mokyr opens by arguing that small changes in metabeliefs—what people thought knowledge was for—reshape incentives: if discovery is honorable and public, inventors chase peer recognition, and access costs fall as journals, correspondence, and encyclopedias diffuse ideas. “Turning useful knowledge into what today would be called an open-source system” reduced access costs and raised the returns to originality.
Part II – The Republic of Letters as a market for ideas. Early modern Europe was politically fragmented but intellectually networked, enabling small “bands of intellectuals” to navigate “within an ocean of darkness,” tied by rules and values that prized openness, contestability, and transnational critique. This private-order institution anointed experts, policed quality via reputation, and turned priority into a currency; “reputations required openness.” Because printing made marginal dissemination costs tiny and “superstars” drew outsized attention, the system produced convex returns to genius—one Galileo could move the frontier more than many competent scholars combined. And precisely because it spanned borders, exit options disciplined censorship: if Paris clamped down, Amsterdam beckoned.
In practice, nationalism, sectarianism, and patronage still mattered, but the ideal—that a scholar “belonged to all nations”—pulled behavior toward transparency.
Part III – Bacon and Newton as cultural entrepreneurs. Bacon framed the moral case for interrogating nature; Newton demonstrated that nature’s rules could be discovered—“those rules were within reach.” The “Baconian program” linked science to material improvement and a belief in progress as a public good.
Progress became policy—informally at first, then institutionally.
Part IV – Open science, property, and disclosure. Mokyr highlights the paradox that patents restricted use but revealed designs, while copyright and priority rewarded originators without making knowledge secret; the combined regime made science contestable and innovation visible. “Open science was the best guarantee for the continuous cumulative nature of useful knowledge.”
Part V – Europe and China: the divergence in culture and access. Mokyr confronts the Needham Puzzle—why China’s early lead didn’t yield an Industrial Revolution. He collates quantitative evidence suggesting Europe published far more titles; one careful estimate (Buringh & van Zanden) implies Europe issued ~40× more books than late-Ming China, a gap too large for survival bias alone to explain.
China’s block printing and character set limited movable type; “moveable type printing did not really take off in China before 1800.” Crucially, the bridges between scholars and artisans—central to Europe’s knowledge-to-practice pipeline—remained weak in China; Needham himself lamented the “sharp gap” separating literati from craftsmen. Imperial projects like the Siku quanshu centralized knowledge under state auspices, while diffusion and public access lagged—seven copies, mostly palace-held, summarize the accessibility problem.
When crackdowns came (e.g., the Qianlong era “literary inquisition”), they chilled the market for ideas—evidence points to book destruction and scholars hedging by claiming Western science was indigenous.
Part VI – Europe’s safety valves. Because the market for ideas crossed borders, coercion in one polity could be arbitraged by publishing in another—coffeehouses, salons, printers, and correspondence networks created a redundant web. Hence the “polycentric state system” was a feature, not a bug.
Part VII – From belief in progress to measurable change. Mokyr devotes a chapter to the idea of progress as it becomes explicit: “the growth of useful knowledge…was considered to be central to this concept of progress.”
Part VIII – Limits and lags. He’s sober about timing: before 1700, many scientific feats didn’t yet yield factory-floor breakthroughs; but by the 18th century, the feedback loop from science to technique was tightening.
Part IX – What changed the slope of the curve? My read of Mokyr is that three gears mesh: norms (openness, reputation, priority); infrastructure (printing, learned societies, correspondence); and exit/competition (polycentric Europe). Together they create selection pressure that filters, rewards, and scales good ideas. The Republic of Letters, small in headcount (Bayle estimated roughly 1,200 members in his day, perhaps 12,000 a century later), had outsized influence because it governed how claims were validated and who counted as an expert.
As Mokyr puts it, legitimacy reduced enforcement costs: once the rules of contestability and openness were taken for granted, they didn’t need a police force to work. The result was a high-variance, superstar-skewed attention economy that nonetheless benefited the median by creating a long tail of “normal science.” And because codified and tacit knowledge complement each other, published breakthroughs multiplied the productivity of artisans and engineers. That mix explains why the Industrial Revolution became a cultural event as much as a technical one.
Part X – Epilogue in one line: the “Baconian heritage” is “the cultural acceptance of the growth of useful knowledge as a critical ingredient of economic growth.”
And that is why culture—not just coal—matters.
4. A Culture of Growth Analysis
Does Mokyr support his claims with evidence and logic? In my view, yes—and where the evidence is thin, he’s careful.
The logical spine (norms → institutions → incentives → cumulative knowledge → productivity) is coherent, and the micro-mechanisms (priority disputes, learned societies, reputational payoffs) are well-documented with primary and secondary sources. He is quantitative when possible—e.g., book-production comparisons and diffusion indicators—while acknowledging survivorship bias and measurement noise. He also limits causal claims where translation to technology was delayed, noting how few pre-1700 lab results immediately transformed shop-floor practice.
Importantly, he emphasizes complementarity—codified knowledge doesn’t replace tacit skill; it amplifies it.
Does the book fulfill its purpose or advance the field? It does—and it sparked a live debate.
For example, a review in the Journal of Institutional Economics praises the framework yet argues Mokyr leans too heavily on a handful of “cultural entrepreneurs,” questioning whether great individuals explain enough variance.
I think Mokyr survives that critique because his mechanism is population-level (reputations, norms, exit options) even while using Bacon/Newton as narrative anchors. He repeatedly reminds us the Republic of Letters was small—but its rules governed a growing commons.
Moreover, outside reviews of Mokyr’s broader oeuvre (e.g., The Enlightened Economy) underscore that ideational change complements, rather than displaces, material explanations like wages or energy. New empirical work about the chronology of industrialization (e.g., Cambridge research pushing roots into the 17th century) illustrates that the cultural turn is compatible with earlier, diffuse changes in labor and industry. If anything, these findings strengthen Mokyr’s point: once norms shift, small technical changes cumulate across decades.
And the Nobel committee’s 2025 framing—honoring Mokyr for showing how scientific knowledge and social openness precondition growth—confirms the argument’s ongoing relevance.
Where I wanted more is on negative cases—times when open science existed but growth stalled, or where strong states sustained openness without polycentric competition.
Still, the book’s guardrails (contestability, disclosure, exit) remain a powerful diagnostic.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths.
First, Mokyr writes with a rare synthesis: cultural history that never loses the economist’s eye for incentives. Second, the Republic of Letters chapter is a masterclass; the phrase “the jealousy of the learned shalt increase wisdom” stuck with me—it’s a perfect encapsulation of reputational markets. Third, the Europe–China contrast is nuanced (he rejects easy “no Enlightenment, no industry” reductions) yet empirically grounded in printing costs, censorship, and scholar-artisan distance.
Weaknesses (minor, for me).
The superstar narrative risks underplaying institutional drift and contingency; also, measuring culture is inherently fuzzy.
Additionally, some readers will want more integration with wage/energy/coal literatures and earlier proto-industrialization.
But even the critics agree the book reframes the debate in durable ways.
On pacing: a few sections are dense with names and citations (Bayle, Diderot, Fumaroli, etc.), which is good scholarship but may challenge non-specialists.
On mechanisms: I loved the patent/copyright treatment as complements to openness—not contradictions—because disclosure requirements and priority rules created incentives and transparency.
In rhetoric: the progress chapter connects belief to behavior with clarity: progress isn’t sufficient alone, but it “lubricates” the machine.
On evidence: the late-Ming vs. Europe book-production gap (40× in one estimate) is a striking statistic that anchors the China chapter.
On fairness: Mokyr notes Chinese movements like shixue and kaozheng; the divergence isn’t about capability but about bridges and institutions.
Bottom line: the book is persuasive, humane, and rigorously sourced. And it gives policymakers levers that don’t rely on miracles.
Build the culture; the growth follows.
6. Reception, Criticism, Influence
Reception was swift and serious.
A roundtable in European Review of Economic History gathered scholars to engage Mokyr’s thesis as a “major intellectual achievement,” while also probing whether cultural entrepreneurs can carry so much explanatory weight. In Journal of Institutional Economics, Hodgson stresses that too much weight on too few people risks underestimating structural drivers, even as he praises the argument’s originality.
Across reviews, the consensus is that the culture → institutions → incentives chain is now unavoidable in any serious account of modern growth.
Influence beyond academia appears in innovation policy debates about open access, priority/credit, and the curation of knowledge commons.
And with Mokyr’s Nobel, the argument graduated from interesting to canonical.
7. Comparison with Similar Works
How does Mokyr compare to materialist or institutionalist accounts?
Against wage-and-coal theses (e.g., Allen), Mokyr doesn’t deny prices or energy; he reframes them as necessary but not sufficient without cultural plumbing to keep innovation cumulative. (JSTOR)
Relative to pure institutions (Acemoglu–Robinson), he emphasizes micro-institutions of science—priority, journals, learned societies—over constitutional macro-structures alone.
Compared with Mokyr’s own The Enlightened Economy, A Culture of Growth zooms out from Britain to Europe’s Republic of Letters, but the causal arrow is consistent: Enlightenment ideas changed incentives and practice.
For readers steeped in knowledge commons theory, the Republic of Letters is the prototype—Mokyr gives it economic bite.
And as the British Academy lecture underscores, high-skill artisans were the hinge where culture met craft.
8. Conclusion
My overall impression: this is the rare book that changes not just what you know, but how you explain the modern world.
It answers the hardest question—why growth became normal—by showing how beliefs, incentives, and institutions interact to make discovery public, cumulative, and socially rewarded. I recommend it to economists, historians, technologists, policy designers, and anyone building innovation ecosystems; founders and R&D leaders will find the open-science and priority chapters especially actionable. For general readers, it’s challenging in places but worth the effort; this review provides the scaffolding.
If you want a one-sentence takeaway to remember: Make it honorable—and rewarding—to publish and credit new knowledge across borders; prosperity follows.
That’s A Culture of Growth, in practice.
And it’s the culture today’s innovators still need.
9. A Culture of Growth Quotes
“Open science was the best guarantee for the continuous cumulative nature of the useful knowledge.”
“The growth of useful knowledge…was considered to be central to this concept of progress.”
“Reputations required openness.”
“The jealousy of the learned shalt increase wisdom.”
“Bacon’s heritage was nothing less than the cultural acceptance of the growth of useful knowledge as a critical ingredient of economic growth.”
On Europe–China printing: estimates suggest Europe published roughly “forty times” more books than late-Ming China, a gap too large for survival bias alone.
On scholar–artisan distance in China: engineers’ “real work” was done by artisans “who could never rise across that sharp gap…from the ‘white collar literati.’”
On superstars and diffusion: printing and networks meant marginal dissemination costs were “negligible,” amplifying the impact of great minds.