Luxembourg School of Business hosted Professor Joel Mokyr in Luxembourg.

Professor Mokyr is the laureate of the 2025 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, and one of the world’s foremost economic historians. The prize was awarded for identifying the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress.

He came to lecture on the origins of sustained growth.

The question behind that title is deceptively simple. The world was poor for millennia. Then, in one corner of Europe, it stopped being poor — and stayed rich. Why there, and why then?

Mokyr’s answer is not invention. Inventions occurred in many societies that never grew wealthy; ingenuity is not scarce. What changed was the arrival of useful knowledge — knowledge that explains why something works, not merely that it does — together with institutions willing to test it, contest it, publish it, and pass it on. Growth, on this account, is not a windfall. It is what happens when a society builds the machinery to produce and circulate knowledge, and then keeps that machinery honest.

It is a thesis with an evident bearing on a small, open, prosperous economy that has to keep earning its position.

The occasion was the opening of our Joint KUL–LSB PhD in Business Administration, the doctoral program we run in partnership with KU Leuven. Professor Mokyr has accepted to serve as its Patron.

Our thanks to him for the lecture, and for the conversation that followed it.

More on the program shortly.