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Institutions, ideas and economic change: some reflections on Geoffrey Hodgson's ‘Culture and Institutions’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2021

Joel Mokyr
Joel Mokyr*
Affiliation:
Departments of Economics and History, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
*
Corresponding author. Email: J-Mokyr@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

Professor Hodgson in his review of my A Culture of Growth (Princeton University Press, 2016) raises a number of important issues. One of them is the usefulness of the concept of a ‘market for ideas’ as an analytical tool in discussing the way cultural change affects economic change. Even though there is no price mechanism that clears the market, many basic components of the economic analysis of markets carry through and enriched by evolutionary concepts. A second question is the importance of cultural entrepreneurs, who play an important role in my book. It should be stressed that such ‘Vital Few’ were rarely indispensable, yet their influence on subsequent events may have imparted a direction on events and accelerated them. In any event, the success of such entrepreneurs was an indication of an intellectual environment sufficiently open to new ideas to be consistent with major new ideas such as the possibility and desirability of sustained economic progress.

Keywords

Economic growthevolutionary models
Type
Note
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 18 , Special Issue 1: Institutions and Culture in Economic Contexts , February 2022 , pp. 169 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Millennium Economics Ltd.

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Footnotes

Note: Segments of this paper are adapted from Mokyr (2018).

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