Interview with the 2025 laureate in economic sciences Joel Mokyr on 6 December 2025 during Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

How were you as a child? 

Joel Mokyr: My childhood really is divided into two parts. The first nine years I lived in the Netherlands in a town called Utrecht in the centre of the country. Then in 1955, when I was nine years old, my mother decided to immigrate to Israel. We ended up in Haifa and I lived there. I went to high school and then did my military service. Basically, I had a Dutch childhood and an Israeli childhood, and they were very different. Not just in language, but in everything, when Israel is like no other country in terms of growing up. I went to the university, I studied economics and history, and then decided to go get a PhD. I did my PhD in the United States at Yale, and then ended up by some weird concatenation of circumstances at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois. It turned out that was sort of my first and my last job. I’ve been there 51 years at same university, basically doing what I seem to know what to do, which is teach, supervise graduate students and write. 

Was there a particular teacher that influenced you? 

Joel Mokyr: The first day I went to the university, I remember it very well. I was a freshman, I came right out of military. I didn’t know nothing, and I went to a class. I still remember very well who taught it. It was a man called Emmanuel Sivan, who’s still alive. He actually turned out to be a historian of the Middle East, but for some reason he was teaching a course on England before and after the conquest of 1066. I remember the first class and I went home. I had no telephone, because telephones were very expensive. I wrote a letter to my mother and I said, “I just went to a class by dr Sivan. I want to become like him. I want to become a university professor.” And I’ve never looked back. The course was actually quite good. I mean, it was not something I was going to do or related very much to, but just the idea of standing there in front of a class and telling them and teaching them things that they didn’t know and would have never known otherwise. I felt that was kind of a nice thing to do. 

What do you like about teaching? 

Joel Mokyr: I guess like many academics, as the saying goes, I’m sort of in love with the sound of my own voice. I just love to stand in front of a student and explain things that they didn’t know before. One of the nice things about it is that my students are always the same age, and I get every year a year older, but somehow you remain in contact with young people. That in some ways is refreshing. If you live in a nursing home and you’re surrounded only with old people like yourself, you begin to think like an old person. You behave like an old person. But I’m always surrounded by young people. I don’t want to say it keeps me young – it doesn’t, nothing keeps you young – but you don’t start thinking like an old man. And I don’t think I do, at least I try not to.  

The important thing here is the distinction between graduate and undergraduate students, which in the US makes a huge difference. Undergraduates, there’s a lot of them. The vast bulk of them, I don’t get to know. They’re sitting in class, I lecture and we grade the exams. After two years, I can’t remember any names. I don’t know who was there, unless it’s somebody who’s really exceptionally good. With graduate students, it’s different. You work with them for four years. You see them every week. You see them in seminars. You talk to them. You have dinner with them. They come to your house. 

I have supervised something like over 65 PhDs, both in economics and in history. I would say at least two thirds of them I’m still in contact with. I read their papers. I see them at conferences. We correspond. They tell me “I had a baby,” “I got divorced” or whatever. I’m still in touch with them. I consider them almost like my offspring. My students are starting to have students, so they are my intellectual grandchildren. There’s a whole tree of people who are sort of converged on me. They’re students of my students and so on and so forth. But that’s actually a very nice feeling. It’s just like having children without having to pay for college.  

What is your advice for students to reach their full potential? 

Joel Mokyr: Undergraduate or graduate is a very different story. For the graduate students, my first advice is: don’t have any hobbies. If you have a family, train them well. You need to work 70, 80 hours a week. There’s no substitute for completely immersing yourself in work. Once you get tenure, and once you’re established, you can take some slack. But before that, you have to work all the time. Especially in a field like economic history, which is very labour-intensive. You have to collect data, clean the data, analyse them, read the literature, understand what you’re doing. It’s a lot of time involved.  

The other thing is focus. If you’re working on a project, don’t let it go until you’re done. Because so many times people start a project and then right in the middle they get interested in another project, and they don’t finish the first one. They don’t finish the second one, they move into a third one. In the end, they have 10 unfinished projects and nothing to show. That kills an academic career. So, focus and be dedicated.  

The third thing is “perfect is the enemy of good.” Particularly fields like economic history, there’s always things that are unknowable. Beyond what the data tells you and what the story tells you, there are always questions you can’t answer. If you try hard enough to answer them, there will be other questions you can’t answer. You can spend the rest of your life drowning into one project and never finish it. At some point you say, “Alright, I have said what I’m going to say. I admit what I don’t know” and move on. You close the paper, you send it off to a journal, and you go. But I have seen in my career many cases of people whose careers failed because they were trying to write the perfect paper. Don’t write the perfect paper; write a very good paper. Don’t write the perfect book; write a very good book. Because perfection really is not achievable in the social sciences. It’s achievable in mathematics. In mathematics, you have a theorem, you prove it, you get it right, you’re done, and that’s perfect. But in the social sciences, that’s never the case. There’s always things you’re not going to know. There’s always things that remain ambiguous, and some things are unknowable. So you concede that and you say, well, I don’t know this, somebody else might take it from there. Or maybe we’ll never know. 

What qualities are important to become a successful researcher? 

Joel Mokyr: Self-discipline. The willpower to pull yourself away from things you’d rather do, like watch an interesting series on Netflix or go on a long vacation or develop some kind of hobby that takes a lot of time. You need to discipline yourself not to do that. I mean, if you really care about some hobby, then maybe you should not involve yourself too much in research, because research is really a very harsh and demanding master which requires a lot of self-discipline. Unlike any other job in the world, there’s nobody who tells you to get up in the morning and “Do this, this, and that, and that.” As a researcher, you have to guide yourself. That’s hard. That takes self-discipline. You need to be able to have a little sort of homunculus in your head that tells you, “All right, you’re up now, now go to your computer and do this, that, and that” rather than spend the next two and a half hours reading the New York Times, which is more fun maybe, but it’s not going to get you anywhere. That self-discipline is critical. If you don’t have it, you’re not going to make it. I have seen so many academics who were brilliant and smart, that didn’t have self-discipline, and you never see them anyway. 

What is the impact of AI on humankind? 

Joel Mokyr: Well, we are only at the beginning of it. One of the things that seems to be recurring in history is that at the very beginning of a revolutionary and radical invention, it takes a while for people to recognise how revolutionary it really is. I think that’s probably the case with AI as well. I’ve studied the introduction of some of the radical inventions in history, like printing press, steam engine, electricity and so on. But I lived through the introduction of the personal computer, and the personal computer changed everybody’s life. I think when I bought my first IBM PC – it must have been in the early eighties – it was kind of convenient. It was a word processor. But I never thought that I would be listening to music from it, talk to my cousins, watch movies. You don’t really know how this is going to affect your life. The same is probably true with the smartphone. At first, it was just a telephone with a few things. Now you do anything you want with it. So I don’t think we fully know what the effects of AI is going to be, but like every major invention a lot of the effect depends, not so much on the invention itself, but on the people who use it. That is a source of some concern, because who is going to control AI? Who is going to regulate it? What can be done and what can’t be done with it? There’s all kinds of interesting moral dilemmas that AI raises that are new and that we will have to cope with. 

One of the things, of course, is that the distinction between fiction and reality is going to become ever more difficult. But by and large, I think AI will be essential in physics, in chemistry, in biology, in economics, and all those fields are going to undergo transformations. In fact, that has a historical analogy, because if you look at the great scientific revolution of the 17th century, one of the things that were driving it is new instruments: the telescope, the microscope, the vacuum pump, all kind of things that were built by artisans. Then scientists discovered that they could advance science with it. Most famous of course is Galileo grabbing the first telescope, looking at Jupiter and says, “Oh, Jupiter has moons, who knew?” But he would never have been able to do that without a telescope, because the telescope allows you to see things that nature didn’t mean for you to see. The same is true for the microscope. You can look at some dirty water, and you see little animals crawling which you wouldn’t have been able to see because you can’t see bacteria with your eyes. Nature didn’t want us to see bacteria, but here we are, we are fooling it.  

The same is true for high powered computers. The same is true for AI. In that regard, it’s a very powerful instrument. It will make science faster, better, more advanced. Mankind is facing one of the greatest challenges in history, if not the greatest, and that’s climate change. Because it’s not happening in one place, it’s not happening in another. It’s the entire planet in danger, and there’s two ways we can cope with it. Either the political agreement that we all agree to somehow phase out fossil fuels, or coming up with technologies that allow us to adapt to a different planet. The political solution does not seem to be on the horizon. Every time you look, it’s fading away further. If you just looked at this latest COP30 meeting in Brazil, they’re not going anywhere. It’s not going anywhere. We need to come up with technology that helps us cope with a changing environment. Without artificial intelligence, that’s going to be very hard. With artificial intelligence, we may be able to solve the problem. I don’t know exactly how, nobody knows, but clearly it will be a matter of coming up with new technologies that somehow remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help us switch from fossil fuels to non- fossil fuels, get rid of methane gas, and a whole bunch of other things that we need to do. With artificial intelligence, we have a chance. I’ve not predicted that we will, but we have a chance. 

What motivates you to continue doing research? 

Joel Mokyr: I’m too old to take up the cello or basketball. I guess one of the satisfactions in life is doing what you’re good at and not to try to do things that you’re not good at. I am not very good at sports. I never have been. As a kid, I tried to play soccer. I was a dismal failure. I tried hard, but I would not coordinate enough. I was hopeless. But this is something that I think I’m reasonably good at. I enjoy what I’m good at. Not only that I like my job, but there are days when I bicycle to the office and I’m thinking, “Gee, they’re paying me for this. I like it so much, I should be paying them for the privilege of doing this because I’m having so much fun.” 

Watch the interview

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