Scholars have long debated what sparked Europe’s economic surge in the mid-18th century.
That debate took center stage recently at the University of Chicago, where an expert panel from the Harris School of Public Policy and Northwestern University—a group including two Nobel laureates—held a wide-ranging and pointed discussion on history’s lessons for growth.
Hosted by Harris’ Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility, the April 14 event featured Steven Durlauf, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at Harris and the Stone Center’s director; University Professor James Robinson; and Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University’s Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences.
Mokyr won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on the historical origins of sustained economic growth; Robinson won in 2024 for his work linking political and economic institutions with prosperity.
The event offered a rare opportunity to hear three leading academic voices examine the origins of the modern economy and forces shaping its future. The Keller Center's Forum filled quickly, leaving standing room only for the panel moderated by Veronica Guerrieri, the Ronald E. Tarrson Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the UChicago Booth School of Business.
Mokyr described the recent book he co-authored, Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000. Stretching over the millennium, the book argues the two arcs diverged near the halfway mark due largely to differences in culture and social structure. These led China to turn inward as Europe became the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
As China emerged from the Middle Ages, Mokyr explained, extended families, or clans, grew stronger, binding people through kinship. In Europe, the opposite happened. Family ties loosened, replaced by what he called “alternative institutions” of guilds, monasteries, universities and autonomous cities.
This focus on shared purpose over common ancestry created space for strangers to collaborate, for ideas to circulate, for institutions to evolve, Mokyr argued.
Europe became an innovative place where people could challenge authority, question tradition and imagine something entirely new. China remained intellectually vibrant as well, but was less inclined toward radical change.
“You see a very active intellectual community in China, but you don’t see radical ideas or people saying, ‘Let’s overthrow everything and start anew,’” said Mokyr.
Durlauf and Robinson followed him to the podium with critiques that sharpened the debate over how lessons from history connect to economic growth. Both discussed the difficulty of drawing clear conclusions across so many years.
“It’s extremely difficult to disentangle a kind of causal relationship over such a long period of time when so many other things are going on,” said Robinson.
He pointed to “other things” not central to Mokyr’s thesis, such as the voyages of European explorers and the 17th century English Civil Wars, during which King Charles I was beheaded, as critical turning points.
The mid-1600s were “a period of tectonic political change,” Robinson said.
“Radical new ideas came on the table as the fixed and daunting structures of the external world—monarchy, lords, church—crumbled.”
“This was a world turned upside down,” he said. “And from that world turned upside down, all sorts of things started happening: economic things, political things, institutional things, cultural things.”
Durlauf framed the discussion around time, contingencies and inequality.
Different forces, he argued, operate on different timescales. Short-term growth may be driven by factors like technology or savings rates, but deeper forces unfold over centuries. And unpredictable “shocks” can reshape trajectories for generations.
“There are shocks to systems that are so persistent that the theory has to do with the shocks, rather than to the mechanisms themselves,” he said.
He added, “growth changes everything.”
“It creates all these possibilities, but it also creates capacities for stratification,” keeping wealth and power stuck in the same hands.
When conversation turned to the present, Guerrieri said that China’s rapid economic rise was not such a surprise. What is surprising, she continued, is the extent to which Europe is lagging.
Europe lacks a true counterpart to California's Silicon Valley, Durlauf noted, raising an open question about whether the advantages that built the modern economy will carry into the next phase.
—This article was originally published on the Harris website.
