How ideas drive prosperity: Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr at Bocconi
What allows a new idea to gain a hearing and eventually change the world? For economic historian and 2025 Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr, the answer helps explain how societies achieve sustained economic growth. On 27 October, he will deliver the 2026 DONDENA Lecture at Bocconi, under the title “The Market for Ideas – Then and Now”
The event will begin with welcome addresses by Rector Francesco Billari and by Guido Alfani, Director of the DONDENA Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy.
The lecture will examine how people proposing new insights, discoveries and ideologies compete to persuade others and gain influence. Like other markets, the market for ideas has a supply side, a demand side and a structure that shapes how it operates. Its workings have profound consequences for scientific and technological progress.
Mokyr will compare this competition during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution with its operation today, exploring how the circulation and reception of ideas affect economic growth. The question connects directly to his Nobel-recognized research: what conditions allow technological advances to generate sustained prosperity, and why must societies remain open to new ideas and receptive to change?
Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University, Mokyr shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for their research on innovation-driven economic growth. His latest book, co-authored with Guido Tabellini and Avner Greif, is Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000.
According to Guido Alfani, who hosts the event as Dondena director, “It is not only an honor, but also a great pleasure to have Professor Joel Mokyr with us. This year, the Dondena Centre celebrates its twentieth anniversary, and I could not think of a speaker better suited to the occasion. Professor Mokyr has won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress — research in economics but deeply informed by history as well as by the social sciences. This is the kind of genuinely interdisciplinary research that the Dondena Centre treasures and aims to foster at Bocconi.”
The lecture takes place from 6:00 to 7:30 pm in Aula Franceschi, via Sarfatti 25, Milan. Registration is required.