Illinois has made investments into education through its schools and teachers and that has been evident recently as Northwestern is now home to a Nobel Prize winner.

Northwestern University’s very own Professor Joel Mokyr has earned the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He has earned this award along with Phillippe Aghion of the Collège de France, Peter Howitt from Brown University, as they all collaborated in creating a mathematical model for a theory regarding sustained growth amidst creative destruction.

Mokyr’s works such as “A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy,” and “The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress,” aims at learning what factors drove the Industrial Revolution to be what it was and how it impacted world history from an economic standpoint.  His works also explain how developing nations can attain and developed nations maintain creativity within the technological sector of their economies to keep up with the evolving times that we are in.

Professor Mokyr curated his knowledge through his undergraduate education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968, majoring in economics and history. He also went on to get a master’s degree in economics from Yale in 1972 and a PhD from Yale in 1974.

Professor Mokyr is known by fellow colleagues at Northwestern as deeply impactful and visionary with his views on where our modern and future economy could look like.

The Nobel Prize in Economics is the one of several awards for the storied professor, the most recent being in 2018 when he won the Elinor Ostrom Prize for his written piece “Cognitive Rules, Institutions and Economic Growth: Douglass North and Beyond.” He has also won the 2006 Heineken Award for History and the International Balzan Prize for his innovative research regarding the history of Europe and the origins of technological change.