The Nobel Prize for Economics this year has been awarded to Joel Mokyr, Phillipe Aghion and Peter Howitt for inquiring into how innovation has kept growth going for over two centuries, the post-Industrial Revolution era, without major periods of rupture or stagnation. This, they argue, is vastly different from the aeons which preceded this period, marked by flat and inconsistent growth.

This inquiry is both interesting and controversial, because it seeks to explain how innovation translates better into economic growth in some societies than others — which is Mokyr’s area of work, as he develops a theory of knowledge diffusion. As against the historical sweep of Mokyr’s work on the sociology and institutional basis of innovation, Aghion and Howitt have delved into how ‘creative destruction

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