et pour les plus courageux·ses, l'article en question: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

(also, i should add that i agree with @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social that Bob Allen would have deserved to be there alongside Mokyr)

oh, and @goulven.bsky.social recently put together a great special issue on the history of endogenous growth theories to which i was lucky enough to contribute: shs.cairn.info/revue-cahier...

anyway, you should read what Béatrice has to say on the Nobel as she is always spot on: beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2025/10/13/w...

i am not yet sure what to make of all this, but i believe there is something to be written about the dichotomy between growth theory and economic history, two fields that feel so close yet far apart but that the Nobel committee nonetheless decided to celebrate together yesterday.

today, growth theory has fallen out of fashion and the type of economic history that gets published in top general interest journals has adopted the many causal inference tools of applied microeconometrics which differ from the eclectic set of empirical methods Mokyr used throughout his career.

growth theory and economic history have followed different trajectories since the 50s and while there have been many attempts at establishing a dialogue between the two fields, very different methodological standpoints (in particular the use of theoretical models) have stood in the way.

and here we go again in 2007 with a workshop at the EUI in Florence (organized in part by @kevinhorourke.bsky.social) in which Steve Broadberry and Crafts were invited to engage with Oded Galor and assess unified growth theory.

in 1996, it is Paul Romer and Martin Weitzman that were sided against economic historian Nicholas Crafts at the annual meeting of the Association to assess the contributions of new growth theory in a session with a telling title.

but this was not a one-time feud: the tensions were still unresolved when economic historians and growth theorists met at the 1984 meeting of the AEA, for a redux of the Solow-Rostow debate in which Arrow also took part (the proceedings of the session were edited by Parker and Kindleberger).

neither of them minced their words: Solow criticized Rostow for the lack of an "orderly relation between economic theory and economic history," and Rostow noted tensions between a "world of problems of simplicity" and a "world of organized complexity." (see doi.org/10.1215/0018...)

take the debate that occurred betwen Solow (a growth theorist) and Rostow (an economic historian) at a conference organized by the International Economic Association in 1960 in Konstanz to assess the latter's ‘economics of the take-off’ that had just came out:

despite obvious similarities in their object of study (why are some countries rich and others poor?), the relationship between the two fields has indeed been rather conflictual in the second half of the 20th century.

an open access link for those who want to check it out: rdcu.be/eAXDr