Tanguy Le Fur

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

Cahiers d'économie politique 2025/2 (n° 87) Contributions à une histoire des théories de la croissance endogène

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...

What does a Nobel Prize on ‘innovation-driven economic growth’ actually reward? A historian’s perspective on how to deal with the Nobel frenzy I generally try to stay away from the Economics Nobel frenzy, if only because the hyper-personalization of scientific achievemen…

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).

In the Kingdom of Solovia: The Rise of Growth Economics at Mit, 1956-70 From its flow tide, fueled by the Cold War, to its ebbing with the anti-growth movement and the economic crises of the early 1970s, the “growthmen” of MIT stood at the center of the dominant field in ...

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.

as someone who engages in both growth theory and economic history i'm happy to see both fields celebrated by this year's Nobel, but because i also dabble in history of economic thought i think it should be noted that the decision to pool them together may not be as natural as it seems.

What does a Nobel Prize on ‘innovation-driven economic growth’ actually reward?

A historian’s perspective on how to deal with the Nobel frenzy

beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2025/10/13/w...

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

Fighting for resources: a unified growth model of the Great Divergence - Journal of Economic Growth This paper interprets the Great Divergence as the cumulative influence of small asymmetries in technology or various initial conditions, amplified through conflict over resources. It introduces a trac...

our paper with @etiennewas.bsky.social is out in the Journal of Economic Growth, here's our modest contribution to the long-standing debate on the role of the appropriation of resources—and conflict more generally—in global economic history.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

new paper in which Etienne and I show that introducing conflict in a unified growth model can generate a Great Divergence without substantial differences in initial conditions, as the appropriation of resources amplifies even the slightest asymmetry between countries.

cepr.org/publications...