Opinion PB Mehta writes | Lessons from a Nobel laureate: To become a knowledge power, India must address structural disconnects in its own knowledge

Another striking feature of Mokyr’s work is his Weberian sensibility about historical causation. Social reality is causal but not law-like. Although his books have overarching arguments, they are attentive to complexity and to the conjunctures that make an argument work. In this sense, his work is much richer, and his histories more rewarding, than those of other historically-minded economists who have won the Nobel Prize, such as Douglas North or Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson. Their emphasis on institutions is salutary, but their account of institutional causality is ultimately too abstract and rests on a more simplistic and tendentious reading of history. Mokyr offers a genuinely historical and sociological critique of economics’ dominant modes of thinking. He uses parsimony when appropriate, not as an end in itself. His history, like all serious history, will be controversial in parts, but never simple-minded. In The Lever of Riches, he is attentive to the conditions under which his explanations may not hold. One of the remarkable things about his histories is how much they make you think.

Mokyr’s account is Weberian in another way: It makes space for the explanatory power of ideas. But it is also a conjunctural account that links two forms of knowledge: Propositional knowledge, which concerns regularities in nature, and prescriptive knowledge, which is about techniques — how to make things work. The friend who recommended The Gifts of Athena thought its central argument especially relevant to the Indian context. Many societies have been good at discovery. But for Mokyr, the Industrial Revolution cannot be explained by factors like the comparative price of energy or heroic individual inventions. It was sustained by the interaction between propositional and prescriptive knowledge — between discovery and invention. The subtext for India was clear: Science and engineering need to be integrated into a productive feedback loop. This has been a structural weakness of the Indian knowledge system. The 20th century, Mokyr suggested, saw the deepest institutionalisation of the relationship between these two knowledge forms. But it remains controversial what actually enables such institutionalisation.

Mokyr’s histories are somewhat sceptical of the state. Not only is the state bad at picking winners, it often prevents even known winners from realising their potential — as in China’s past. Historically, and sometimes against the grain of his own narrative, Mokyr tends to downplay the role of the state in creating the preconditions for sustained innovation. Yet contemporary China now offers a living refutation of his thesis on the state, even as it vindicates his account of the feedback loops between different forms of knowledge.

The fascination of Mokyr’s work lies in its claim about a shift in elite cultures. The explosion of interest in scientific knowledge among European elites in the early modern period was astounding. It is important to remember that this scientific temperament does not exist primarily at the individual level — many great scientists believed all sorts of weird things — but is embedded in the epistemic cultures of institutions. Mokyr does not reduce science to sociology, as sociologists of science often do; science has its own autonomy as a mode of human experience and as a causal force. What he conveys is how an elite culture forms around science: Institutions, networks of diffusion, and most remarkably, social conditions that spot talent and allow it to flourish. His account of the political dynamics of this shift in A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy is interesting, if a little tendentious. It rests on the claim that a paradoxical combination produced Europe’s intellectual dynamism: Political fragmentation combined with a trans-European republic of letters. States competed for talent, but within a culture that allowed ideas to circulate freely across borders.

But why was European fragmentation different from that elsewhere? Consider post-imperial fragmentation in other regions, including India. New intellectual histories of India make one wonder if something else is at work. One of the remarkable features of Indian intellectual history is how successfully it created a trans-political and open republic of letters. Not only were religious and literary texts widely disseminated, but a small town like Navadipa could become the epicentre of Navya-Nyaya logic in the 17th century — surpassing even Benares. Nyaya manuscripts became pan-Indian currency, despite political fragmentation. So India, too, had political pluralism and extensive elite circulation. Comparative literacy rates in 17th to 19th-century England and India are contested, at least if Dharampal is to be believed. The sad truth is that Indian economic, intellectual, and cultural history still has too many large gaps for the Indian case to be fully diagnosed. The few references to India his work are comparatively flat, largely owing to the paucity of sources.

Mokyr forces us to confront a profound truth: Knowledge does not grow on its own. It is cultivated by cultures and institutions and legitimised by ideas. If India is serious about becoming a knowledge power, it must confront the structural disconnects in its own knowledge systems — the weak bridges between science and engineering, discovery and application, the factory and lab. It must learn to reward and match talent. The real challenge is not just investment or incentives, which we are throwing around freely. We will get easily dazzled by an odd win, ISRO or a new AI centre. The real challenge is building a sustained culture of innovation. Athena, or in the Indian context Saraswati, are not just goddesses to be worshipped: They have to become palpable social forces.

The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express