YouSaid · the spoken record

Joel Mokyr

lines on the record: 51
first: 2026-07-08
most recent: 2026-07-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That are demanded of me has been shall we say disruptive and I sleep relatively poorly now because I wake up in the middle of the night and I go, oh shit, you know, I forgot to reply to that email and I haven't yet committed to that invitation and I forgot these things happen. And so I hope that that will fade eventually and that I'll settle into a new pattern, but it will be probably quite different from the previous pattern Tyler, I think. I mean, my wife is looking at me with some concern, shall we say, about how I'm having 10 balls in the air and every once in a while I drop one.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, it is a lot of fun, and clearly a lot of warm glow. I mean, I'm still waking up every morning and say, you know, I'm dreaming this and what the hell am I doing? It has obviously disrupted my life. And, you know, I'm going to turn 80 this summer, so I'm sort of settled in my way, so to speak. And this has disrupted it to a great extent, and I'm still trying to cope with that. But one of the things that's working to make that worse is because I refuse to retire. So Peter Howard, my friend and my colleague, who's almost exactly my age, retired 12 years ago from Brown. So, you know, he's living in a life of leisure. And I have to go to faculty meetings and supervise 10 graduate students and teach another graduate course. So that plus all the other stuff.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's, I think, a striking thing. The Germans really more than the British realized the potential of science. And certainly by 1900, they're leading the world, certainly in chemical, in electricity, in food processing industries. And so it is, I think, above all human capital, but also the policies that were there to support it.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More and more get committed to the application of scientific research to their economy. That takes a long time and it's not an easy thing. So the two Germans invent things like organic chemistry, right? Useful Liebig and Friedrich Werner. And they make major contributions to electricity, to internal combustion engine, to a whole range of industries. But a lot of that is based on science and it's striking not just the German universities produced these scientists, but that businesses, particularly manufacturing, hire these people as consultants. So put them on the board of governors and their board of trustees.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“thing is that Britain even so it was the leader really when actually late in catching that on so the British universities really by by the middle of the 19th century people started worrying about says look the Germans and the French have these more advanced institutes of higher education and our universities are still way behind and so in the second half of the 19th century there's this sort of Suppose a decline of Britain because they're still based on skills whereas the Germans”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who essentially created what one might call the sort of mother, the idea of the modern research university. But there's also this technical universities, which the Germans founded. And there's a recent paper by a former graduate student of mine, Ralph Meisenza, at Chicago Fed, who shows that the closer you were to a university in the middle of the 19th century, the more likely you were to be in advanced manufacturing. So I think here it really is to some extent improvement in human capital, but also the fact that the state in Prussia and in other places as well, this little statelet, basically convinced themselves that this was the way of the future. If Germany was going to be playing with the big boys and not being wiped out by Napoleons, they were in 1806, they should build economy based on science.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Germans started, I think there is a major revolution in Germany after, during and after Napoleon. Can you get a whole bunch of reforms most famous are reforms of course in Prussia which is the main country in the northern part of Germany in which they completely rejiggered their administration this Steinhardenberg forms basically creates the world's first really effective civil service but at the same time what the Germans do they invest very heavily in human capital and the evidence suggests that German universities and German schools were much more geared toward giving people a background in the kind of knowledge that helps creating the basis for a sort of a second generation manufacturing technology and so lots of this is associated of course with the reform of the German university system associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since we ain't getting a lot better, a lot depends on for whom, you know, so there's groups that are gaining clearly, there's groups that are losing clearly, the groups where we don't know. On balance, I would say, probably overall living standards in Britain in 1840 were not much better than they were in 1760, but they were different because people, you know, one of the reasons that people don't do well, they live in cities, which are terrible at the time, right? This is widely described and it's fully the most famous book about that was, of course, Frederick Engels' condition of the working class in England, which was largely plagiarized from a whole bunch of doctors living in the Midlands and observing these places. But that is, I think, a complication in the history of living standards during the Industrial Revolution that really means that it isn't so obvious that this was good for the people living through it. It was very good for their”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“were rising during the sort of heyday of the Industrial Revolution. That turns out to be a complicated issue because at the same time Britain was developing technologically very quickly and establishing factories, you have very rapid population growth. And its population drove that's driven by higher birth rate rather than by lower death rates. And what that means, of course, that you have a very large chunk of people who are young and still not productive but need to be fed. And so the rise in the dependency ratio in addition to the fact there's more people around is essentially putting a constraint on the rise of living standards. And that abates at some point in the middle of the 19th century, and then you see living standards rising very rapidly. During the Industrial Revolution, I think the evidence that things were getting better is very mixed. And so I don't know optimists in the pessimists about this. And I would count myself as probably as somewhere in between things weren't getting a lot worse.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“better housed and on and on and on and as a result the reduced form of looking at that is height. The data show that on average British soldiers which the people are getting measured were two inches taller than the fridge and that the reason for that is because as children they experienced better living standards. I think that is the way of thinking about it. Now that sort of feeds back again into the fact that the quality of workers in general is substantially higher than it is on the continent and that's where their wages are higher. So the notion that they were in innovating because people were trying to save labor because wages were so high in England, you know, misses sight of the fact that the reason wages were higher was because British workers on average were more productive. But I would be hesitant to say that I've ever convinced myself that living”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the piece really deals about if you talk about the JPE article that we published in twenty twenty three, and that piece the main argument about that argument that Pete wasn't about so much about living standard. It really was about the sort of regional distribution of Britain, Britain's industry, and how the sort of center of gravity of the economy moved from the south to the north of England, at least temporarily, I should say. But it was really mostly about skill. But what is true in that argument is not so much that the living standards were increasing, but that they were just higher.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hundreds of pages of evidence of that. I'm looking at every industry you can imagine and it pops up over and over and over again”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the more flexible the better trained, and certainly by the middle of the eighteenth century, this is what everybody is saying, and the French and the Germans and the Dutch and the Austrians and the Spanish all know that if you want to build a sophisticated piece of equipment, you need an English engineer to run it. And that's what they do. And these people are all over the continent. And of course, Britain is worried about this, so they pass these laws prohibiting the immigration of our citizens, which of course they couldn't enforce. But the fact that that is by now, I think, not really disputed. And the argument that we're making is that, you know, inventors are all good and nice. But if you don't have the people to scale it up and maintain it and install it and operate it, it's not going to do you any good. And that's where the skills are and that's what they had.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every skilled engineer, artisan, you know, mechanic, shipbuilder, whatever you are looking at, they are all trained by other people like that. They're apprentices trained as masters. That's how it works. It works like that everywhere. But the difference is that in England the system is market-based, you see. In Europe, and on the continent, until the French Revolution came around, this is controlled by guilds, and it's very heavily regulated, it's very heavily scripted. And so in England, it's a much more free system. And every young lad who is looking for a master can go around and choose the master that he likes best and that is most suitable to him. So what you get is that because his market is competitive, you get a quality of education to these people, which is vastly better than it is in a continent. People are more than...”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, in fact I had a British Protestants I mean the Anglican church instead of a weird mixture of a lot of Protestant belief minus the Pope, right? I mean I'm not sure that you could call them Protestant. They're kind of Anglican but no it's not religion. I think that's a whole load of nonsense. What happens in Britain is, and this is something worth pointing out because this is the sort of new book that I'm writing right now. It's based on some articles you've seen. But the new book is basically arguing that the main thing that gave Britain its advantage over other things was that they had more skilled and that their skilled workers were better than everybody else. And the question is where do these skills come from? And the answer is only one answer that is apprenticeship because there's no engineering schools, there's no technical schools.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially there is no concept of progress in there. There is no concept of progress in any of the Roman writers. Now, some of the engineers obviously were trying to make things work better, but it is not really a social movement. And as soon as a problem has been solved, they say, okay, we solve that. And that's it. Whereas in Europe, it's never good enough. You make water mills more efficient, you're even more efficient, and on and on and on. And that is the engine that drives sustainable growth. The idea that whatever we have today, we can make it better. And that may be not a natural insight. Maybe it's not hardwired enough.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Though I think the idea that they had a concept of program, they were practical people and they needed to bring water from here to there and they did that and they needed to build roads so that their soldiers could march and occupy the world or the world as they knew it. But I don't think there is a concept of progress the way we would think of it. And instead of an interesting little book that I published in my series, which you may want to look at, about Pliny. And, you know, you look deep, and this is, you know, somebody who really knows Pliny, and he really points this out, that Pliny, you cannot find anywhere, and Pliny was tried to summarize essentially every little encyclopedia of what was known. Basically, there is no concept that things were getting better over time. This is a book by Richard Sallard. So it's one of the great classical scholars of our time.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And once you have that, you can sort of see all those smart guys trying to solve practical and pragmatic problems, you know. So scientists, many scientists, almost all scientists, I would think, there's some exceptions, almost all of them said, look, I want to do science, not only because I'm Whose life question but that is what they really emerges in Europe and no other civilization does that, Tyler.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a slave society, slave societies often look at manual labor with a great deal of condescension. So that's, you know, in the end, I think that's what stopped them. But the other thing is, I think that if you don't have a concept of progress and you don't think that by studying things and investigating things and doing what we would call research in order to make the world a better place, at least from a material point of view, if you don't have that concept, there's not going to be an industrial revolution. And the Chinese don't have that concept either, you know, coming back to China. I look quite a long time for this. And basically, all the Chinese experts that I have read essentially said that the concept of progress is basically absent. Now that's a concept that's emerging in Europe in the 15th and 16th century. And by 17th century, it's quite commonplace.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even that was fairly constrained is they do come up with water mills. But the water mills remain by and large tools for grinding wheat, wine and corn. They don't actually take it to the kind of extremes that Europeans did in the Middle East going into sawmill and fooling mills and kind of an industrial and sort of a little factory, which is why factories were notice mills. They never do that. And I think the reason is because the people who made things, okay, the artisans, the workmen, and the people who knew things and studied things, which is the scientists and the mathematicians and the teachers, never talk to each other. And what's more, the scientists essentially looked upon hard work and manual labor with a great deal of contempt. Both Plato and Aristotle make these points, but the Romans took it over.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that at some age we need glasses we start at age, I don't know when you start wearing glasses, but I start wearing glasses when I was in my early forties in order to read and things like that, that's not a cultural feature. That's something that's hardwired in us. The Romans were the upper class, were literate people, and they had glass, but they never invent spectacles. And there is, you know, and they don't have optics and they're not interested in optics. There's a passage in Seneca in which he sort of thinks that he looks at a glass that has water in it and says, hey, it's interesting, the stuff that's after behind the glass actually is magnified. But they never take the step of coming up with eyeglasses. Then you wonder why because clearly if there is necessity is the mother of invention, this was a necessity. They never do it. The sort of only thing that you see happen.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Greek scientists were wrong about many things and that they could do better. And once you have that belief, and Francis Bacon and a whole bunch of other people sort of were all in that tradition, in Rome, what you see is a whole bunch of clever people, but they're not that interested in technology. Let me give you one specific example, Tyler, that I have always found particularly intriguing, although I don't have a good answer why it happened, okay? But if you think about human needs, okay, one of the concepts of human needs above all”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the kind of knowledge that we have about nature, you know, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and so on, that that should be applied toward material improvement, that's not an immediate and obvious insight, nor is it an immediate and obvious insight that progress, as we understand it today, is feasible and or desirable. These are all insights that arose in Europe in the 16th and 17th century. I have referred to these things, as you surely know, as in what I call the Industrial Enlightenment. So there is this change of mind in European thinking after maybe 1450 or 1500, maybe because the printing press, maybe because of other reasons, but in which Europeans essentially start to convince themselves that they are smarter, that anybody that came before them, that a lot of these great Hellenistic”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think would be that both Robin and Greek civilizations were in many ways creative, but the creativity did never really extend very much into the technological realm. And insofar that they did science, they were mostly uninterested in applying that science to day-to-day problems. And that insight”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Established in East India Company the trades with India in London, but that in Delhi you don't see a Western European company or an England company that does to the Europeans what the Europeans did to them. So that asymmetry is already there in 1600.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did not really want to get too deeply into India because it's pretentious enough for me to sort of spend a couple of years reading Chinese history, which other people spend their entire lives on one village or one county. I mean, it's just a huge ocean. And I can't really say that I did it more than sort of dipping my toes in it. But we wanted to take a step back and look at these two big civilizations and try to see why they differed. And I want to stress again, we don't make the argument that India or China failed. What they did was, you know, they were doing what their preferences and their institutions in some sense dictated. But I find it always telling that the British”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The weirdos, it's Europe that are the exceptions, and that's essentially the tenor of Joe Hendrick's book called The Weirdest People in which he points this out, that that book has a big influence on us because it really shows in great detail how organizing people by nuclear family creates not only a different set of social organization, but the culture that goes with it. Now, I don't want to draw the analogy between India and China too far, but it's kind of striking that many of those European corporations are woefully missing in India as well until the Brits show up and in a way show them how to do it, but even there, I think, it is fairly rare until certainly until 1948 and India becomes independent. But the truth is...”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I may admit it, I do my knowledge of India and Indian history is probably not up to par, certainly not a European is who spent the last five or six years familiarizing myself with Chinese history. In our last chapter there is a discussion of India. My sense is that India is a different version. The Chinese clan system. It's organized differently because you have this sort of combination of clans and castes in India. But basically, they too are unable to create the kind of unique system that you see in Europe in which you see these nuclear families living in a society or which is organized mostly by corporations. In that sense, I would say all, if I may add to that, all the three great Asian civilizations, Middle Eastern Muslim civilization, Indian, Hindu, and Muslim civilizations and China share something. It's Europe that is...”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What that really means that if the Europeans are mostly confronting one another, whereas the Chinese in most cases are worried about people from the outside, which is they have this wall and they have this military that's posted on the outer boundaries of China to keep the savages out. That creates a very different kind of world. And interestingly enough, again, one of your colleagues at George Mason, Mark Koyama, has a bunch of papers that describe this in great detail and quite, I think, elegantly and ingeniously, how that sort of geographical differences can create the difference between the Chinese government which remained a unified state and Europe which remains fragmented basically until the present day.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of them were Mongol, some of them were Turkmen, some of them were actually partially Chinese. But if they are not full-blooded, hand Chinese and they come in and in vain, very often they become sinophied. They start speaking Chinese, they start dressing like Chinese, they behave like Chinese, they adopt Confucianism, and they accept most of the Chinese institutions, such as the imperial examination, and they get absorbed into the clan system. And so there's nothing like that in Europe. Europe really, since the early Middle Ages, is not invaded effectively by any other non-European power. I mean, the Ottomans try a couple of times and they get defeated. The Mongols try once, 1240, and then if they had taken over Europe, history would have been very different, but they turned around and go back for internal reasons. And so...”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, no, no. I think China is simply located in a very different kind of geographical and demographic neighborhood. It is essentially it remains for all practical purposes unified since the rise of the song in nine hundred sixty. I mean, there's a splitting of the southern and northern song for a little while, but it's basically a unified society which shares a language, a particular written language, which is very important. But what happens is there's these wild people on their border that every once in a while they invade China. And that happened more than once. I mean, it happens during the Mongols, of course, in 1279, and the Mongols actually establish a dynasty, the Yuan dynasty, that lasts about 80 years if I call correctly. But what is interesting, Tyler, is that when these people from the steppe.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an innovation happens after 1400. I mean, the steam is complete stagnation sitting in, and some of the things that they knew how to make in earlier times, like the sophisticated clocks that they built in the 11th century, they disappear. And so for me, that's worth telling. Then, you know, how many calories of carbohydrates were consumed on average if we could ever calculate that correctly.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is on the verge of really changing our understanding of how creation works, and that's not just Newton and Galileo. There's a whole body of work that is emerging. And there's really nothing parallel like that in China. China is a very sophisticated society in many ways. The literacy rates are high. They have a well-funded and well-organized system of education. But they don't really continue their earlier forays into science and into new technology. Somebody actually went out and looked at Joseph Niedham's many volumes on Chinese technology and science or science and civilization, as he called it. And he discovered something which I guess we all knew, but they put numbers on it. Almost nothing that Needham pointed out.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“nineteenth century, you know, in terms of food the Chinese were capable of producing enough food and the number of famines in China is probably not a lot worse than in Europe. But what you see what happens during the first opium war is blowing all of this out of mighty empire to pieces and the Chinese have to accept this terribly humiliating peace. You can also see how the technological gap has grown between the two. For me, that is much more telling than the living standards. The other thing that I should like to point out is that when you look at Europe in the 16th and 17th century, you can see that the capability of expanding the set of useful knowledge, including science, is growing very rapidly, whether there is a scientific revolution or not is a debate that I want to get into. But certainly by 1700, Europe is...”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of global change and not only that they change their own diets, they change the Chinese diets because the Europeans bring from the new world things like peanuts and sweet potatoes and things like that, and they change the Chinese diets with the Chinese themselves are not agents here. They are accepting the stuff that the Europeans did to some extent and they're rejecting others. But it's the Europeans who are the agents of change here. They are the entrepreneurs. They are the people who bring about the changes, Tyler. And so my sense is that this is going typifies the difference between Europeans and the Chinese. Europeans are more aggressive. They are more outward looking. In the end, what you see by the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, you see that the gap, the technological gap is huge. In some ways much larger than the living standards gap even in the”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To some extent of import substitution by Europeans trying to mimic the goods that they were importing from China or not just from China, from India as well. But pottery is a good example. So one of the things they really wanted from China was Chinaware, that's why it's called Chinaware. And it took them a while to be able to match the Chinese capability in the ceramic industries, but they do so eventually. And then they stop importing the stuff from China. The same is true, you know, for say cotton and other products that we're getting from the East. And so European living standards, I think, should be measured in part by the fact that when the Europeans start their voyages across the globe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, they are able to bring in a whole”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it is. I think it's a main factor, and you know, I think the idea of looking at standard of living, one thing I'm very skeptical about how standard of living are actually measured. I know that this is what Pomerantz and other people have, and Jack Oldstone and other people have argued that the living standards in China were comparable to the West as late as seventeen fifty. I'm not 100% sure that that is true. But certainly for my money, what really defines the divergence is that technologically the gap between the two countries starts to become visible at the time of the Renaissance. In terms of a whole bunch of things that you see growing in Europe, you know, and stagnant in China. Now keep in mind, of course, that part of the European growth is due to the fact that they borrowed ideas from China. And then the Industrial Revolution.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Confucian beliefs and so on Whiztern values so I'll give you one example which I find particularly striking one of the great insights of Western society over the years has been the idea of intellectual property rights You don't really actually see anything like that anywhere in the world. You know the combination of a patent system and copyright and all these things, that's a very Western European thing. The Chinese never had anything like that. And the whole concept of intellectual property, right, was alien to Chinese thinking until about 30 or 40 years ago. And now if you look at the data, Chinese patents have just skyrocketed. And clearly that idea has now penetrated Chinese society. But the idea, for instance, of having self-governing autonomous universities still hasn't quite gotten there because Chinese universities are very much”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of it is the consequence of the last 20 and 30 years, but also you should keep in mind that since the first opium war, Europeans have been penetrating China and many of the European values and ideas were being mixed in with the Chinese culture and what you get is some kind of mixed product which produced many of these cities. Many of these cities were known as treaty ports, you know, Hong Kong and Shanghai and so on. And so they grew in large part because the Westerners that came there and settled there and actually ran their own show. But I think China in the last, certainly, you know, since the death of Mao in nineteen seventy six, it's adopted many of the European ideas and many of the European cultural values. And as a result, what you get today in China, sort of weird mixture of persistence of things that were around you in the empire for thousands of years,”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it isn't economic. We never say in the book anyway, you will not find this, that it was economically inferior. That's a way of thinking that we have long abandoned. It's different. And in many ways, under the empire, the Chinese got what they wanted. What we think, what Europeans think of being inferior, the Chinese actually, I think that was their objective. What they wanted above all was stability and internal peace rather than what the Europeans wanted, which was progress and growth. And so these huge cities in China, well, I remember them incredibly populated place. But in fact, urbanization in China, say if you look at 1850 or 1900, is much lower than is Europe. The urbanization that you see now is really all post-imperial.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self governing and made their own rules, and again, you see cooperation between people who share a location but not necessarily an ancestor. So these things tend to be very persistent precisely because of institutions interacting with culture and culture feeding back into institutions. So they evolve or co-evolve, I should say, together. And that makes them, I think, much more persistent, Tyler.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“French Revolution on the continent, they were weakened in England much, much earlier. Monasteries still exist in Catholic countries, in the Protestant countries than in England. They were completely abolished. But the frame of mind and the cultural values that growing up in a nuclear family imused, that kind of thing sticks around. Corporations, of course, remain, but they change their form very much. The one most persistent of all those corporations, interestingly enough, were universities. And effectively, the form of universities with the fact that they are self-governing and they're sort of self-contained organizational units that write their own rules and their own bylaws, that thing, despite a lot of pressure on them, is still surviving, which I find very striking. But we should think about a world that consists of lots and lots of different organizations like that, in which cities, for instance, were”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that it actually changes people's culture and people's values. And so if you look at all the work that's been done by economists like Stephen Enke and anthropologist like Joe Hendrik, they all show a very tight correlation between attitudes and cultural values, kinship, whether it has extended kinship or nuclear family. So I think what you could do in China and in Europe is you could maybe change your organizations, but you cannot change the state of mind. And an interesting fact is that many of the corporations that we talk about during that were established during the Middle Ages eventually disappeared or became very unimportant. So for instance, guilds became, you know, eventually got abolished after the”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good question. There's some debate about how much persistence there really is, particularly the communist regime under Mao did all they could to erase the influence of clans and replace it, of course, with communist functionaries, there's some evidence and some research recently shown that that wasn't 100% successful. And so I think What you get particularly in societies such as China, but in other places as well where”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's no question that the church never saw the emergence of corporations in Europe, nor do I think that the Chinese Imperial Service ever seriously considered the possibility how this would change life in China. But that's what happens. You try to follow one objective and then something very different emergence over time. That's what history is all about.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if they die interstate without heirs, then in many cases the property that these people own reverted to the church. And so pure naked greed by the church, which was not unknown in the Middle Ages, I think was a driver here. And so goodies have convinced me that that actually is a substantial factor. There are other arguments that have been made in this context, but I think these are the two that are most striking. The other question is, why is it that the clan in China is so convenient for the imperial bureaucracy to rely on? So both of those things happen in parallel. And I would think maybe if I made one observation, in both cases, this is historical outcomes as the unintended and unanticipated consequence of very different.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“thing which he also throw Goody's argument and I think there's a great deal of truth to that is that the church wants to weaken any kind of organizations that compete with it for power and control in the local communities but they also have figured out that if you organize society by nuclear families then a certain proportion of people died without heirs.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's some debate about that. They don't of course tell you, I think, two components about this, and I would not know how to weight them. But there's two sort of things happening here. The first is that the Catholic Church really becomes quite obsessive about certain sins that they consider to be particularly egregious. And one of those sins is incest. And so, you know, every society in the world prohibits marriage between siblings, but other, you know, more remote relatives is more ambiguous. And the church becomes quite obsessive about this. And at the end, there are places where they actually prohibit the marriage of fifth degree cousins. Now, how anybody in the Middle Ages would know who is fifth degree cousins is unclear. I don't know who my fifth degree cousins are, maybe you do.”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“dynasty into later dynasties you see this thing growing. The problem in Europe is that the nuclear family, which became the fundamental building block of society, is too small to provide local public goods. You need to cooperate with others. And so what emerges in Europe quite spontaneously is a bunch of things that provide these local public goods that you just don't see in China. So for instance, we have something called universities. We have monasteries, we have autonomous cities. And so all of those things are what we call corporations. What this is is people who are not related, but what they share is not an ancestor, you know, guilds have one kind of objective, universities have another one, and so on and so forth. And that divergence in social organization turns out to be, in our view, to be one of the”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As in China it moves exactly in the other way, in the other direction. In China you get more and more people getting organized by their extended family. The reasons for that are fairly complex. In Europe it's particularly I think the Catholic Church that played a major role here, this was argued quite a while ago by a guy, anthropologist called Jack Goody, but your own colleague Jonathan Schultz wrote what I think is one of the best papers on the subject who pointed this out in great length and actually provided a fair amount of systematic evidence for this. In China there is no Catholic Church and the imperial bureaucracy is more and more in Cahoots with local clans to whom they actually outsource a fair amount of the things that they were supposed to do. And so as you move on out of this period of the”
2026-07-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source