Jan 2, 2019 · 36m · a16z
a16z Podcast | Knowledge Builds Technology and Technology Builds Knowledge -- with Joel Mokyr
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Economic historian Joel Mokyr and host Sonal Chokshi explore how historical cultures of growth, competitive knowledge networks, and scientific skepticism during the Industrial Revolution created modern economic prosperity and continue to drive technological progress today.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The host holds 27.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 4.8 Guest teaching 4.5 Guest disagreement 1.5 The host pushing back 2.3
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 7:33 Rejecting the Kumbaya narrative
Mokyr forcefully rejects the host's romantic idea that historical scientific debates were more civil, mocking the notion that scientists sat around a campfire singing Kumbaya.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 10:38 Host challenges elitism in credentialed knowledgeThe host explicitly challenges the traditional credentialed hierarchy, arguing that internet platforms enable meritocratic reputation building outside established elite institutions.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 7:33 Reframing scientific history and priority disputesMokyr educates the host on historical realities, detailing ugly rivalries like Newton vs. Leibniz to prove that historical markets for ideas were just as vindictive as modern internet discourse.
The host holds their own ▶ 18:44 Host introduces deep learning and psychology cross-disciplinary synthesisThe host demonstrates high-level domain expertise by framing deep learning's breakthroughs as a structural hole synthesis with developmental psychology, earning direct praise from Mokyr.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contestability and Challenging Ancient Wisdom | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | The host asks an insightful question connecting historic contestability in scientific thought to modern business upstarts and the role of trust. Mokyr responds by explaining the Republic of Letters, Latin mottos, and how trust operates across decentralized epistolary networks. | |
| Priority Disputes and Competitive Intellectual Markets | 5 | 6 | 3 | 3 | When the host muses whether the Republic of Letters was a more civil era than today's internet debates, Mokyr directly rejects the premise, pointing out intense priority fights like Newton vs Leibniz. The host responds with solid knowledge of peer review and priority execution. | |
| Elitism, Institutions, and Virtual Communities | 6 | 5 | 3 | 4 | The host highlights how early knowledge networks were elite and contrasts this with the internet lowering friction for creators globally. Mokyr responds with 'yes and no', emphasizing that top-tier innovations still concentrate in elite university hubs. | |
| Weak Ties and Interstitial Innovation | 7 | 4 | 1 | 2 | The host demonstrates exceptional domain knowledge, citing Granovetter's weak ties, Ron Burt's structural holes, Xerox PARC, and modern deep learning borrowing from developmental psychology. Mokyr enthusiastically praises the host's examples and extends the concept into economics. | |
| Focused Problem-Solving and Major Societal Bottlenecks | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Mokyr walks through historical examples of focused problem-solving like longitude, smallpox, and ballooning. The host contributes complementary observations about Asian scientific history and modern private sector focus like Mars exploration. | |
| Unintended Consequences and the Risk of Stagnation | 5 | 5 | 2 | 3 | The host brings up public fears of technology second-order effects and contrasts European precautionary stagnation with dynamic technological shifts in China. Mokyr strongly warns against stagnation, calling anti-GMO sentiment unfounded. | |
| Mismeasuring Economic Growth in the Digital Era | 6 | 5 | 1 | 2 | The host introduces the Wikipedia example to show unmeasured zero-cost consumer value, along with Spotify and shoe shopping friction. Mokyr validates this and details how standard GDP accounting fails for dematerialized quality changes and consumer surplus. | |
| Conclusion and Final Remarks | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Standard cordial sign-off with the host thanking the guest and Mokyr expressing delight at the conversation. |
Statements from this episode (20)
Mokyr: Mutual feedback between knowledge and technology drives economic growth
“Now, what is true for steam engines is essentially true across the board. Knowledge. Builds technology, and technology builds knowledge, and that synergy between these two sort of different aspects of human knowledge is what drives essentially our modern econo…”
Mokyr: Skepticism and contestability remain core to modern intellectual progress
“Skepticism and contestability become essentially the keywords of intellectual activity, and that's still true today.”
Mokyr: Scientific co-authorship was rare during early modern knowledge creation
“Much of the knowledge created at that time is created by single individuals. There's not that much collaboration, you know, co-authorship, and these are multiple names on papers and books that we see today, that wasn't very much, that was quite uncommon in tho…”
Mokyr: Trust in decentralized networks is built through expert peer vetting
“The reason that trust emerges is because that everybody knows that if you publish something or you, some discovery, some, Mathematical theorem that you have proven, or some planet you've discovered, or some new species that you found, that others will take, wi…”
Chokshi: Market Credit Goes to Effective Execution, Not Original Discovery
“What really matters is who took it to market and executed on it well. So it is really interesting that when you think about authorship and the previous models of knowledge that were produced, that it's not necessarily the person who received credit is the pers…”
Mokyr: European Progress Was Driven by Fragmentation and Intellectual Competition
“What made progress possible in this market for ideas is that it was a competitive market, and one thing economists know, competitive markets, by and large, work better than uncompetitive markets, and what is critical in understanding About the European system …”
Mokyr: Open-Source Software Mirrors Academic Tenure Reputation Incentives
“The way my university and any other university gives tenure is they look at your reputation. That's how these things are being decided. And so Joe Blow has the incentive To publish as much as he can, because that's how he gains a reputation. And so everything …”
Mokyr: A dozen top institutions drive most major technological breakthroughs
“Internet or no internet, a disproportionate number of them come from a dozen institutions such as Caltech, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, you know, and Northwestern places like that.”
Mokyr: History offers little guidance for understanding the modern technological age
“I am not really a great believer in the hypothesis that there's an awful lot we can learn from history about our own age, because our own age is so different in so many ways”
Mokyr: Industrial Revolution succeeded despite state institutions, not because of them
“The national institutions probably play a relatively secondary role. Quite frankly, you know, if you put a gun to my head, I would say what happened, happened despite the best efforts of these states, not thanks to them.”
Mokyr: Every major modern technological advance originated from informal knowledge networks
“Out of that came our modern world. Out of that came every technological advance that made a big difference in electricity, in textiles, in steel, in, you know, in transportation, in medicine, you name it. It came all out of those interactions.”
Mokyr: Quantum Leaps in Knowledge Require Recombining Different Fields
“What happens in many fields is that they tend very quickly to reach a situation in which progress becomes rather incremental, and that people basically take the sense of, well, what we know is basically all there is to know, and so we can sort of make little s…”
Mokyr: Almost All Economics Breakthroughs in Last 25 Years Came From Outside Fields
“The last, I think, 20, 25 years, almost all of the major breakthroughs have occurred by people coming in with ideas from psychology or from mathematics. And basically introducing these into economics.”
Mokyr: Climate change will become the central issue focusing modern human ingenuity
“And I think our own age is going to have, go through a similar thing as climate change becomes more and more the central issue that the human race is coping with.”
Mokyr: Climate change can only be solved through technology, not politics
“Climate change cannot be solved by any means except technology, because a political solution is clearly not going to happen.”
Mokyr: Nations prioritizing stability over innovation risk China-style stagnation
“If any nation is going to decide to not innovate because they like stability, they will end up like 19th century China.”
Mokyr: Resistance to genetically modified organisms is baseless and fabricated
“The evidence does not support that there's any danger. This whole notion about frankenfoods is completely made up”
Mokyr: Growth is understated and inflation overstated due to zero-cost digital goods
“We are mis-measuring growth, or to put it slightly different, we're over-measuring inflation, because that, those two things boil down to the same thing, and we've known this for a long time, but it turns out the process is getting worse and worse, simply beca…”