The essential question

Over the past 30 years, there have been Nobel Prizes in Economics for all tastes. The winners were, without exception, notable academics. But let's face it, some of the award-winning topics only sparked interest among a tiny audience of economists. The general public's lack of interest was more than understandable, especially since, in some cases, they focused more on the development of mathematical-statistical techniques than on solving genuine economic problems. Essentially, they revealed a closed-in economics science. The awarded research addressed questions that academic science posed to itself, and said little or nothing about what constituted the human world's challenges to that same science. This year, things were different. The Nobel Prize awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt went squarely to the mother of all economic questions.

We can break down economic problems into infinite questions and doubts. But they all lead back to the same theme. It's formulated very simply: why, after millennia and millennia of essentially stagnant existence, has the world experienced economic growth in the last 200 years? Why only in the last 200 years? And what were the causes?

This graph, known in the literature on the subject as the "hockey stick," illustrates better than a thousand words the nature of the most important economic fact in human history.

By force of habit, we often lose sight of the fact that the innocent expression "economic growth" represented the greatest transformation humanity has undergone. With it, the very face of the planet became unrecognizable. It would be tiresome to enumerate everything that economic growth created. There are so many aspects, now commonplace to us, that would have made our ancestors' wildest and most fabulous dreams come true. Suffice it to say that we've gone from an average life expectancy of around 30 years to almost 90. Or that, until the invention of the hockey stick, 90 percent of the world's population lived on the brink of survival. We've become so accustomed to constant progress that we've come to assume it as if it were spontaneously generated—as if only its interruption could awaken our attention. But, when all is said and done, the interruption of normality is economic growth itself, a kind of secular miracle that has left no detail of human existence untouched. More than any other "fact," it is this fact that defines the boundary between a before and an after . It is this fact that determines that the before has become strange and unrecognizable in the eyes of the after . It is this fact that requires explanation and full understanding. Many economists, from Marx to Schumpeter, from Keynes to Milton Friedman, from Gabriel Tarde to Max Weber, have confronted this problem with varying degrees of success. This year's Nobel Prize winners have dedicated their careers to trying to explain it.

I must have read Joel Mokyr's " A Culture of Growth " about five years ago. If memory serves, on the eve of the 2020 lockdown. Right at the beginning of the book, which is an adaptation of a lecture series, Mokyr described the scientific consensus of our time: "We know what happened, and we know more or less how and where it happened. What remains a mystery is why ." Of the many explanations that have been proposed since the mid-19th century, when the awareness that the world had undergone a profound and irreversible revolution took hold, it's indisputable that we'll have to figure this out:

1. The economic revolution was set in motion by a new, historically unprecedented economic form, which the revolution in turn developed. Let's call it capitalism , the market economy , commercial society , as it was called in the 18th century, or the free enterprise system, as they liked to call it in the US during the Cold War, or something else. The important thing is to understand that the economic form has become a central point in this miraculous transformation of the world—and from which we can also inseparable all the social ills and moral impasses it generated.
2. Political institutions emerged from a previous revolution in political philosophy, natural philosophy, religious criticism, and the resulting practical needs. These institutions, when not "extractive," transformed the law, protected individual conscience and the individual's gradual sovereignty over themselves, and concentrated power geared toward economic change. The creation of the Bank of Amsterdam and later, in the late 17th century, the Bank of England, are the most notable examples of this latter type of institution.
3. The culture of innovation and technological creation that, ultimately, drives economic growth and, above all, makes it endure over time. It is the demiurgic dimension of economic history, in which men and women dared, and dare every day, to play God. And they play God to reinterpret their relationship with "nature" and reconfigure the horizon of possibilities of human existence. At the confluence of scientific cooperation and the millions of inventions arising from the world of economic practice, the spark of the incessant creation of new things is ignited: new products, new needs, new tastes, new methods, new resources, and new idols. Let there be no illusions, because the creation of the new does not spare the destruction of the old, the inefficient, the obsolete, the outdated, even when these perform important social functions or uphold indispensable moral values. Simmel, Carlyle, Marx, and Schumpeter understood this consequence well.

It's true that Joel Mokyr didn't solve this enigma once and for all. Moreover, the centrality he gave to "culture" as the seat of the economic transformations of the last 200 years is also not original. Indeed, this was already the preferred approach among non-Marxist scholars from the late 19th century until World War I. It turns out that Mokyr did what he was supposed to do—helping us understand—better than many of his peers, with more rigor, more depth, and a broader scope. We, humble mortals, will be trying to understand, ignoring the noise of foolish political ideologies and dogmatic academic fads, fulfilling this new commandment of intellectual clairvoyance to the best of our ability.