How Science, Understanding, and Capitalism Super-Charged Human Growth

jelizondo writes:

The Times of India published an interesting article explaining the 2025 Economics Nobel Prize:

"We're a planet of six billion ninnies living in a civilisation built by a few thousand savants," Scott Adams once said - and beneath the Dibert creator's misanthropy is a disarmingly accurate description of how the modern world works. Most of us don't invent, build, or discover anything of world-changing importance. We live inside systems we didn't design, using tools we don't understand, and benefitting daily from the work of people whose names we'll never know. And yet, we're quick to criticise those same systems - science, technology, capitalism - that lifted us from the brink of subsistence to a level of prosperity our ancestors couldn't imagine.

[...] For most of recorded history, humanity went nowhere fast. A peasant in medieval Europe lived much the same life as a farmer in ancient Mesopotamia. Empires rose and fell, plagues came and went, and the occasional invention - a plough here, a printing press there - might briefly improve life. But those improvements rarely built on one another. Progress was sporadic and short-lived. The line of human prosperity was basically flat.

This year's Nobel laureates - Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt - offer complementary answers to that question. Together, their work explains why humanity's growth engine roared to life - and what keeps it running today.

Joel Mokyr, an economic historian, argues that the Industrial Revolution wasn't just about machines - it was about knowledge. Before the 18th century, most human innovation was based on know-how: practical skills, techniques, and tricks. People knew how to do things but not why they worked. Without that deeper understanding, invention couldn't build on itself. Progress happened in bursts but couldn't compound.

The Enlightenment changed that. Science and technology stopped being separate worlds and started reinforcing each other. Scientific discoveries explained why things worked, which allowed engineers to design better tools and machines. Those tools, in turn, raised new scientific questions. Mokyr calls this cycle "useful knowledge" - a feedback loop between theory and practice that transformed invention from a series of lucky accidents into a self-sustaining system.

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