For 97% of recorded history, economic growth was slow, intermittent, and reversible. Then the Industrial Revolution changed everything. Will innovation continue — or are we heading back to stagnation?
For almost all of human history, economies barely grew. Any gains from innovation were swallowed by population growth. Then, around 1750, something unprecedented happened — the "Great Enrichment" began, and the world was never the same.
Stylized representation of global GDP per capita over millennia. Hover to explore.
Mokyr identifies three fundamental reasons why economies stayed stagnant for millennia — and how each brake was finally released. Click each card to learn more.
Any rise in prosperity led to population growth, which pushed income back down through diminishing returns to land.
How it was released: The demographic transition broke the link between income and population growth. Fertility fell with rising income. Meanwhile, technological progress in agriculture raised yields so dramatically that land was no longer a binding constraint. After 1800, productivity growth simply outran population growth.
Wealth attracted plunder. Wars, confiscatory taxes, and mercantilism repeatedly destroyed economic gains — a negative-sum game.
How it was released: Enlightenment ideas attacked mercantilism. After 1815, liberalism, free trade, open markets, and professional civil services took root. "Old corruption" waned in Britain by 1850. The international order since WWII has further reduced predatory wars between nations.
People didn't understand why things worked. It was "engineering without mechanics, farming without soil science, medicine without microbiology."
How it was released: The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment created a culture where formal knowledge was applied to production. The Industrial Revolution "invented the method of invention" (Whitehead). Once innovation was grounded in science, progress became self-reinforcing and much harder to reverse.
The key insight: science and technology don't just flow one way. They co-evolve like two symbiotic species, each making the other stronger.
"The two forms of knowledge coevolved as it were like two symbiotic species, mutually enforcing and abetting one another."
Technology helps science through two channels:
Historically, institutional failures have destroyed prosperity. But Mokyr argues that in a globalized world, knowledge and talent are mobile — innovation will simply migrate to where it's welcome.
Mokyr argues that GDP and TFP were designed for a "wheat-and-steel economy," not an age of digital services, product quality improvements, and free online tools. The gap between measured and actual progress is growing.
Cost per human genome sequencing (log scale). From $95 million (2001) to ~$1,250 (2015) — outpacing Moore's Law.
Techno-pessimists (Gordon, Cowen) say the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Mokyr counters: science lets us build taller ladders to reach higher-hanging fruit. And the two flavors of pessimism can't both be right.
You can't simultaneously worry that machines will replace all workers (technological unemployment) and that technology isn't advancing fast enough (stagnation). The good news: they can't both be right. The better news: they can both be wrong.
Mokyr acknowledges that past productivity growth was partly borrowed from the future — burning fossil fuels, polluting soil, depleting fisheries. Some future innovation will go toward fixing past damage rather than raising living standards. But this is a self-correcting process:
Mokyr argues technology "pulls itself up by its bootstraps" — each advance gives researchers more powerful tools. Here are the frontiers he identifies, each a potential game-changer.
Deep learning, pattern recognition, personalized education & medicine
Editing base pairs in genetic sequences with unprecedented precision
Graphene, carbon nanotubes, nano-engineered materials with custom properties
Autonomous transport transforming commuting, logistics, and urban design
Solar panel costs plummeting, making clean energy economically viable
Additive manufacturing revolutionizing prototyping and custom production
Solving problems that are intractable for classical computers
Manufacturing organic products without living organisms as intermediaries
Nobel-prize-winning tools revealing the nanoscopic world like never before
Pessimists say the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Mokyr's response: science lets us build taller and taller ladders. Each generation of tools — telescopes, microscopes, computers, lasers — gives researchers the power to discover things that were literally invisible to their predecessors. The James Webb Space Telescope is to Galileo's first telescope what today's data science is to Linnaeus's notebooks. The difference is just in scale — but in these matters, scale is everything.
The past is a poor guide to the future. The positive feedback loop between science and technology — each making the other more powerful — shows no signs of diminishing returns. Growth based on the expansion of useful knowledge is not easy to arrest, much less reverse. It is hard and perhaps impossible for a society to "unlearn" what has been learned, especially when knowledge is distributed across billions of people and accessible through digital media.
The real threats to growth are institutional, not technological: corruption, rent-seeking, suppression of dissent. But in a globally connected world, innovation will migrate to wherever it's welcome.