In a display of institutional cognitive dissonance that would make a Soviet commissar blush, the Sveriges Riksbank—the Swedish central bank masquerading as the executor of Alfred Nobel’s will—has finally stumbled upon a revolutionary concept: things actually happened before the invention of the Excel spreadsheet. The intellectual establishment is currently vibrating with the 'belated' realization that Joel Mokyr, a man who has spent his career explaining why the Industrial Revolution wasn't just a series of happy accidents involving coal and child labor, deserves their coveted gold coin. It is a classic move from the Nobel committee: wait until a man’s theories are so entrenched in the academic furniture that they become invisible, then 'discover' them with the breathless excitement of a toddler finding a shiny rock.

Mokyr’s crime, in the eyes of the dismal science’s high priests, was his insistence that history—that messy, unquantifiable slurry of human ambition and stupidity—actually matters. For decades, the Nobel Prize in Economics has been a closed-loop system of math-heavy masturbation, rewarding people for building intricate models of 'equilibrium' that have never existed in a world inhabited by carbon-based life forms. By recognizing Mokyr and the field of economic history, the committee isn't just honoring a scholar; they are performing a desperate, last-minute pivot. They are trying to look relevant in a century where their previous winners’ models have failed to predict everything from the 2008 collapse to why people still buy NFTs. They’ve spent sixty years looking at the dashboard of the global economy while the engine was on fire, and now they’re giving a prize to the guy who wrote the manual on how the engine was built in 1760.

Mokyr’s central thesis revolves around the 'Republic of Letters' and the 'culture of growth.' He argues that the Enlightenment succeeded because a bunch of 18th-century nerds started writing letters to each other, sharing 'useful knowledge' instead of hoarding it like dragons or burning it like inquisitors. It’s a lovely, civilized theory that completely ignores the visceral reality of human nature. The Right loves this narrative because it suggests that progress is the result of 'Great Men' and 'European Exceptionalism,' ignoring the fact that most of that 'useful knowledge' was immediately weaponized to conquer three-quarters of the globe. The Left, meanwhile, is already drafting their performative denunciations, clutching their pearls because Mokyr doesn’t spend every third paragraph self-flagellating over the colonialist subtext of the steam engine. Both sides are, as usual, missing the point: the 'Republic of Letters' wasn’t a utopia of shared wisdom; it was the original LinkedIn—a vast, self-important network of status-seeking academics trying to out-cite one another while the actual work of building the world was done by people who couldn't read their letters.

There is a profound irony in the committee’s timing. We are currently living through a period of profound intellectual decay, where 'useful knowledge' has been replaced by 'algorithmically optimized engagement.' While Mokyr chronicles the rise of the scientific method and the institutionalization of progress, we are busy using the fruits of that progress to argue with strangers about whether the Earth is flat or if seed oils are a Marxist conspiracy. The Enlightenment gave us the tools to escape the Malthusian trap of starvation and misery, and we have used those tools to build a digital panopticon where we can starve and be miserable while looking at high-definition videos of other people’s lunches. The Swedish Academy is handing out a trophy for the discovery of the fire just as the house has finished burning to the ground.

Let’s be clear about what this prize actually is: a participation trophy for the humanities, disguised as a scientific accolade. By awarding Mokyr, the economists are trying to borrow some of the gravitas of history to cover up the fact that their own field has the predictive power of a Magic 8-Ball. They want to be seen as students of the 'long run,' because in the long run, as Keynes famously noted, we are all dead—and conveniently, none of the Nobel laureates will be around to answer for why their 'useful knowledge' failed to prevent the next inevitable catastrophe. Mokyr is a brilliant man, but his recognition is merely the latest symptom of an academic complex that prefers to study the roots of prosperity rather than confront the rotting branches of our current stagnation.

So, let us raise a glass of overpriced champagne to Joel Mokyr. He has successfully mapped the intellectual geography of the 18th century, providing us with a beautiful, detailed autopsy of a civilization that actually believed in progress. Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to drift into a neo-feudal future, governed by tech-bros who haven’t read a history book in their lives and central bankers who think that awarding a prize for 'history' is the same thing as learning from it. It’s not an award; it’s a receipt for a world we’ve already lost.