What a Nobel Laureate Fears More Than AI - ft. Joel Mokyr

Episode Summary

Technology has long been the one part of the economy that never hit a wall. No society has ever run out of ideas. Joel Mokyr, the Northwestern economic historian who won the 2025 Nobel Prize for identifying what makes growth self-sustaining, believes all of that and is frightened anyway.

Episode Notes

Technology has long been the one part of the economy that never hit a wall. No society has ever run out of ideas. Joel Mokyr, the Northwestern economic historian who won the 2025 Nobel Prize for identifying what makes growth self-sustaining, believes all of that and is frightened anyway. 

What worries Mokyr is not new technology like AI, but the social and political institutions it sits inside of: the tolerance for heretical ideas that invention depends on, the contestability that keeps dominant firms honest, and the public bodies that decide which claims about the world are established and which are not.

Mokyr’s prescription is not caution. He thinks the money going into AI looks like a bubble, that a reckoning is likely, and that the right response is to move faster anyway, because demography and climate are not waiting for anyone.