Joel Mokyr on Growth, Innovation, and Stagnation

Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, joins Russ Roberts in a conversation that spans measurement failures, the feedback between science and tools, and why pessimism about stagnation misreads both history and human ingenuity. Mokyr's central claim is that current anxiety about permanent slowdown conflates measured growth with actual welfare gains, which national accounting badly distorts. The discussion begins with concrete examples—aspirin, anesthesia, water chlorination—whose enormous value to human welfare left almost no trace in GDP because their cost fell so low. It extends to less visible gains: the elimination of commuting time through remote work, the dramatic reduction in hours worked over the twentieth century, and the quality leaps in goods like computers that traditional measures simply cannot capture.

The conversation then turns to how progress sustains itself. Mokyr sketches the Science-Technology Feedback Loop, tracing how better instruments enabled the scientific revolution and how computing now serves as an unprecedented research tool. He contests the idea that incremental tinkering suffices; he argues that Diminishing Returns to a Fixed Factor means breakthroughs in conceptual understanding—like Antoine Lavoisier's work in chemistry—periodically unlock whole new domains. A darker theme emerges around Biteback: every technological fix spawns unintended problems requiring new solutions, yet this endless cycle, he argues, guarantees innovation cannot stop. The conversation includes pointed criticism of Robert Gordon's stagnation thesis and touches on job displacement, the rise of new occupations, and the growing role of peer-to-peer markets. Throughout, Mokyr remains optimistic that institutional stability will allow human creativity to produce advances as unimaginable to us as smartphones would have been in 1912.