Turn knowledge into prosperity: Joel Mokyr’s ideas could help India’s economy leap ahead

Let’s focus on Mokyr’s work because it explains why innovation happens and how it endures.

Mokyr’s lifelong project has been to answer a deceptively simple question: why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Europe and why did it last? His answer, developed across The Lever of Riches (1990) and The Gifts of Athena (2002) fundamentally reshaped our understanding of economic history.

In The Lever of Riches, Mokyr drew a sharp distinction between propositional knowledge, the theoretical ‘know why’ of science, and prescriptive knowledge, the practical ‘know how’ of engineering and craftsmanship. These two streams have mostly existed in isolation.

The modern age began when these spheres finally converged, creating self-reinforcing feedback loops between discovery and application. In The Gifts of Athena, Mokyr expanded this framework by defining useful knowledge as humanity’s “equipment in the game against nature."

While technology may appear mechanical, its evolution is social. Knowledge grows when institutions make it easier to generate, test, share and apply ideas. He identified four channels through which societies convert knowledge into growth.

The first governs how new knowledge is created: i.e., who gets to inquire, how research agendas are set and what incentives shape discovery. The second determines how knowledge is validated and diffused—through peer review, reproducibility and open communication.

The third connects scientific understanding with practical use—through trust, communication and collaboration between scientists and engineers. The fourth decides how innovations are adopted or resisted, depending on whether vested interests block new techniques or entrepreneurs and capital markets enable risk-taking.

When these channels are aligned, technological progress becomes self-reinforcing. Otherwise, knowledge and prosperity stall.

Mokyr also quantified ‘access costs’ to knowledge—raised by social and institutional barriers that prevent ideas from circulating. ‘The Enlightenment’ lowered those costs dramatically. Printing presses, scientific societies, patent systems and journals turned ideas into public goods. Patents, often criticized as monopoly licences, also made technical knowledge visible to others.

India should pay heed to Mokyr. We have achieved scale in production and digital infrastructure. Yet, we have not built a comparable ecosystem of sustained innovation. Economic reforms and incentive schemes can improve efficiency, but they cannot produce the feedback cycle of learning.

India’s next developmental leap must focus on building institutions that make knowledge flow as easily as capital. The first task is to bridge the gap between universities and industry, between laboratories and markets, and between academic ambition and commercial risk.

The Anusandhan National Research Foundation and the new Research and Development Innovation Fund have created a scaffolding for this. What’s left are the finer details. We need research parks shared by scientists and startups, doctoral programmes that embed students in industry labs and procurement systems that reward innovation rather than compliance.

India must design a system where curiosity is financed, collaboration is career-enhancing and failure is a sign of experimentation, not incompetence.

India becoming a developed economy by 2047 will depend on achieving an ‘Industrial Enlightenment.’ For this, our social contract must treat knowledge as a public good and innovation as a civic responsibility. The institutions that matter most will be those that connect, not control.

Universities must evolve into engines of experimentation. Industries must view research as an investment in competitiveness, not a discretionary expense. Policymakers must build trust-based systems where information flows freely. Global fragmentation makes intellectual openness harder, but also more valuable.

If we design institutions that make discovery cumulative and collaboration habitual, we could dramatically reshape our prosperity prospects for the better.

The author is a public policy professional.