Joel Mokyr on innovation, human capital and the future

Mokyr says the important resource, when it comes to growth, is human capital. “I actually have a hard time finding many cases in history in which, when somebody came up with a really great new idea, it was impeded by lack of capital,” he says. “If the conditions are right and the idea is good, the capital will flow there.”

Human capital extends beyond technical training. To Mokyr, the non-cognitive skills that schools instill like discipline, punctuality, and the ability to work well and cooperate with coworkers, matter just as much and are often harder for economies to build.

For long-term investors and families thinking across generations, the implication is clear: prosperity depends not only on financial assets, but on the knowledge, habits and institutions that allow societies to keep renewing themselves.

While AI is certainly the trending topic in several industries, Mokyr thinks our collective and cultural obsession with AI swallowed the conversation.

“[For] the last six months I don’t think I’ve given any interview or podcast in which people didn’t ask me about artificial intelligence,” he says. “AI takes all the oxygen in the room, and people actually don’t pay attention to other advances which may be equally or even more important.”

He points to three technologies on the horizon – nuclear fusion, mRNA, and longevity science – that he thinks deserve attention. 

The first is nuclear fusion, which he believes is closer to being realized than its reputation suggests. “The thing [people say] about fusion is it’s 10 years in the future and always will be. I think that is a misconception,” he says. He compares nuclear fusion to electricity, which stalled for decades on hard technical problems before being built out rapidly once they were solved.

On mRNA, the second technology on his list, he is even more direct. “For my money, mRNA is as revolutionary as antibiotics were in the years after World War II,” he says.

Rejuvenation science aimed at slowing the aging process is his third pick. He predicts a future, one that may happen much sooner than most people assume, where people remain functional into their 120s and 130s, driven initially by wealthy early adopters who “want to live forever.” He believes this technology has the possibility of spreading and reshaping retirement, pensions, and work itself. 

When asked what people get wrong about economic progress, Mokyr reached for a statistic he considers hard to argue with and an unexpected one at that. Human height.

Europeans have grown roughly 15 centimeters taller since the mid-19th century with no genetic change involved, purely better nutrition and less childhood illness. “The bigger height is the canary in the coal mine,” he says. “It tells you this is a symptom of how much better we live, and how miserable life was in the past.”

He layers on smaller examples like aspirin, invented in 1896, ending an era when the only remedy for serious pain was opium. Mokyr is not one to romanticize the past. “If you take somebody living today and impose upon them the material conditions of 1815, they would be deeply unhappy,” he says. “I guarantee that.”

Joel Mokyr sees the institutions that sustain innovation in two broad categories. On one side are the incentives for scientists and inventors: patents, tenure, prizes and honors such as the Nobel Prize, which he describes as a “ladder of rewards” that continues to motivate enormous effort even though few people reach the top.

He is more cautious about the political and social institutions that surround discovery. Innovation, in his view, depends not only on brilliant ideas, but on societies that continue to value knowledge, protect inquiry and allow useful discoveries to spread. When those conditions weaken, progress can become more fragile.

Joel Mokyr cites fellow Nobel Laureate Douglas North to explain why institutions matter so much. “Doug once said to me, ‘There’s a reason we economic historians talk about technological progress but institutional change,” he recalls. “Our technology is cumulative. We know what Aristotle knew, but he did not know what we know. That’s not true for institutions. Institutions get better and they get worse.”

That is why Mokyr resists ending on pure optimism. Technology can extend lives, raise living standards and expand what societies are able to do. But whether those advances translate into human flourishing depends on the institutions that guide them.

Progress, in Mokyr’s account, is real, historically extraordinary and worth defending. But it is not self-sustaining. The challenge for every generation is to ensure that the institutions around innovation remain strong enough — and wise enough — to keep pace with what technology makes possible.