By Cormac Ó Gráda
Published in Irish Economic and Social History, January 2026.
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Abstract

Joel Mokyr was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in December 2025 for his insights into the links between institutions, technological change and economic progress. The research that underpinned his findings contrasts strongly with his early career work. The young Mokyr was, above all, a deductive scholar; his forte was in using abstract models in order to test hypotheses about economic development and underdevelopment. The scholarship of the older Mokyr, by contrast, is highly inductive in approach. Nonetheless, the lessons learned early in his career form part of the accumulated knowledge that fed his later work, and deserve to be better known. This paper offers a critical summary of Mokyr's early research, dating mainly from the 1970s and 1980s, which is interesting and important in its own right.