Many have now formed their opinions about the 2025 Nobel Economics Prize and how its focus signals to the world, the criticality of the economics of innovation and growth. However, what was also curious was the quip by the 2025 Laureate Joel Mokyr (one of the three winners) that ‘economic historians don’t win the prize’.

The discipline often undervalues the slow, evidentiary craft of archival work. Yet, when the world grows noisy, amid disruptions by Artificial Intelligence, inequality, fiscal overhangs and geopolitical shocks, policy debates turn to long-run narratives that economic historians assemble.

Growth as social technology first

Mokyr’s central lesson, sharpened by the pedagogy of scholars such as Carnegie Mellon economic historian David Hounshell, is that modern growth is a social technology before it is a mechanical one. The achievement of the Industrial Enlightenment did not rest on a single genius or gadget; it relied on civic machinery that made useful knowledge travel — printers, coffee houses, learned societies, dissenting congregations and guilds that were sometimes cartels but often repositories of tacit know-how. Apprenticeships, shop-floor heuristics and rule-of-thumb engineering formed the codebase of progress. Where guilds faced contestable markets and porous cities, they incubated capability. Where they ossified, they throttled entry. In sum, Schumpeter’s creative destruction works only when the social plumbing allows new ideas to displace entrenched privilege.

This is where the contributions of Mokyr’s fellow Laureates, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, complement rather than contradict Mokyr’s narrative. Their Schumpeterian growth framework provides dynamic microfoundations: innovation rents attract entrepreneurs; incumbents litigate and lobby; and policy can either harden moats or protect the process that makes churn productive. The engine misfires when experimentation is costly and entry blocked; it hums when institutions tilt toward contestability and diffusion. Mokyr shows how societies built a working engine. Aghion and Howitt show how to keep tuning it under pressure.

The quip about Nobels persists because the field sometimes treats history (in fact the economics Nobel itself was an afterthought) as an anecdote rather than a mechanism. Archival material can, however, illuminate incentives more vividly than elaborate regressions adorned with robustness checks and identification strategies. And as a literal claim, Mokyr’s line is likely to be wrong. Other scholars have won the prize building on economic history. Douglass North and Robert Fogel were honoured for placing institutions and counterfactuals at the core of economics. Claudia Goldin received the prize for a sweeping historical account of women’s labour markets. Simon Kuznets’ national accounting was inseparable from historical measurement. Their work demonstrates that economic history is no sideshow. It is the lab where rules, culture and technology are tested as drivers (or brakes) on growth.

What grips the world now

Consider three current anxieties. First, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and jobs. Mokyr’s work cautions that technology shocks rarely act as one-for-one job killers. They reprice competencies and reorganise tasks. The social question is transition management: who bears the cost of moving from old tasks to new ones? Here the Aghion-Howitt injunction to protect process rather than incumbents becomes policy-relevant fast. Portable benefits, credible skills bridges, interoperability and data portability in digital markets. All of these protect workers and entry, not the last generation of firms.

Editorial | Evolution, revolution: On the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2025

Second, high public debt. History also sobers exuberance and fatalism alike. The Dutch and British states that populate Mokyr’s studies did not become credible borrowers through austerity alone. They built civic capacity — tax systems, representative institutions, enforceable contracts — that enabled a rollover of obligations and the financing of long projects. In an era of swollen balance sheets, that lesson is not antiquarian. Fiscal sustainability is institutional, not merely arithmetic.

Third, inequality. Guild history also clarifies how privilege often hides behind claims of quality control and safety. The counter is not iconoclasm but contestability. Lower the costs of entry and diffusion so insiders’ rents are bid down by capability, not pedigree. In digital markets, this maps to pro-competitive procurement, open standards, and limits on self-preferencing. These are perhaps modern analogues of the coffee house and the cheap pamphlet.

Digitisation itself invites a reality check. Sussex economic historian Nick Crafts’ revisions to the British Industrial Revolution show that general purpose technologies (steam, ICT, AI) appear late in macro data because they require complementary investments and firm reorganisation. Meanwhile, Jared Diamond’s wider lens (geography, ecology, diffusion barriers) offers a further reminder — technology is embedded in landscapes and path dependencies. Together, the history bench is a vaccine against both euphoria and despair. It directs attention to institutions, complementarities, and time.

As a documentation

Why, then, does Mokyr’s quip still feel true? Because prizes, like productivity statistics, are lagging indicators. The frontier of research may periodically swing toward identification strategies, but the problems that preoccupy the public (automation, debt, social mobility, geopolitical realignment) are historical in essence. They demand causal stories that unfold over decades, with actors who learn, bargain, and sometimes entrench. That is economic history’s comparative advantage. It documents how societies learn to argue productively and build forums and rules where better ideas defeat old power.

The deeper point, therefore, is not about medals but about machinery. The question is whether societies are protecting the engine — the open, critical, experimental process that moves ideas from discovery to diffusion — or leaning toward merely the owners of the last engine.

History’s answer is blunt: prosperity is the exception. It must be argued for, institutionally and incessantly.

Chirantan Chatterjee is Professor of Development Economics, Innovation and Global Health at U-Sussex

Published – October 29, 2025 12:08 am IST

For representative purposes.
| Photo Credit: iStockphoto

Rahul Gandhi’s statements regarding redistribution — and the polarising rebuttal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi — have brought the topic of inequality to the forefront. Researchers from the Paris School of Economics have shown inequality in modern India to be greater than colonial times.

Several argue that inequality harms democratic processes. Some inequality, others argue, is actually beneficial, since it acts as an incentive to entrepreneurs to start businesses, thereby increasing employment and welfare for others.

This view is mistaken, for inequality can have deleterious economic effects as well. Consider one form of inequality, that of concentration of monopoly power amongst capital relative to labour. This can have negative effects on consumption, welfare, and growth. If done properly, wealth taxes and distribution can have positive effects.

Monopoly power and consumption

Billionaires draw their wealth from monopoly. Their business groups are dominant players in their specific market. This allows them to set prices instead of being determined by the market. The extent of mark-ups above the cost of production is determined by their monopoly power. Thus, for any given level of money wages, real wages — which determine purchasing power — are lower in economies with strong monopolies.

These monopoly effects are currently being experienced as the cost-of-living crises affecting the developed economies. The phenomenon of “greedflation”, or companies raising prices to increase profit margins in the wake of multiple demand-and-supply shocks due to the pandemic, has been pointed to as contributing to high rates of inflation in the West. Textbook economics shows us that the profit-maximising level of output under a monopoly is less than under a competitive economy, implying a welfare loss. Thus, the presence of monopolies can lead to lower real wages and lower levels of output and investment.

Inequality and growth

Assume that a company decides to set up a new factory. Before the new capital stock is created, wages are paid out to workers to build it. The income of the workers is spent on purchasing goods, which increases the income of goods-sellers, whose increased income results in purchases of other goods, and so on. The total increase in the income of workers and goods-sellers is greater than the initial investment. This process is called the ‘multiplier’ effect, wherein investment raises incomes by a greater proportion than the initial investment.

When companies exercise market power, mark-ups and prices will be higher. Real wages of workers are lower, and they can only purchase lesser items. However companies, because of higher margins, will enjoy the same amount of profits from the sale of a lesser amount of goods. The increase in income from a given amount of investment will be lesser under monopoly because of reduced consumption power. Thus, investment will have a weaker effect on growth under monopoly while not affecting profits.

One can argue that consumption of the rich can help boost growth. While the absolute amount of consumption of the rich is more, they consume a smaller proportion of their incomes. The multiplier process depends on the proportion of consumption from incomes. An unequal economy will put lesser incomes in the hands of those with a greater propensity to consume, leading to weaker expansion in the economy.

Redistribution and growth

Some argue that the ‘cure’ of redistribution can prove more harmful than the disease of inequality by affecting job creation. Entrepreneurs would see reduced incentives for amassing wealth under a high-tax regime, resulting in a scale-back of investment and jobs.

One must make a distinction between wealth and profits. Investment occurs under the influence of future profit expectations, while wealth is accumulated past profits. As the Polish economist Michal Kalecki argued, taxes on wealth would not affect investment since it leaves expectations of future profits unchanged. For example, taxing Gautam Adani’s wealth will not affect investment since expected profits from airports depends on the demand for air-travel which is independent of the value of his wealth.

No doubt, the difficulty in converting profits into wealth may deter some business-owners from undertaking investment. But an economy with high expectations of profit would ensure businesses invest even if wealth is taxed. Redistribution can generate forces to spur growth even if some billionaires pull back on investment. For one, if wealth is redistributed and increases income, the multiplier process would become stronger. Businesses would be more willing to invest where purchasing power is strong. If monopolies are curtailed, then prices would be lower and real wages higher, leading to greater demand.

Consider Thomas Piketty’s proposal of taxing billionaire wealth and providing basic income. This might cause some to exit the economy, but can create a new class of entrepreneurs who can create start-ups, freed from the necessity of working for wages. Redistribution is not a silver bullet, and too high a rate of taxation can become a net drain on an economy. Used in conjunction with other policy measures, curtailing inequality can lead to a healthier economy.

‘Over the past decade, India has witnessed healthy redistribution of the good kind — from the poor and middle classes to the billionaire elite’
| Photo Credit: istock

It’s shocking how the Election Commission (EC) has become a mute spectator to repeated violations of the Model Code of Conduct, even when the violators are trying every trick to sow divisions between the majority and the minority. Yes, I am talking about the Congress and how its starriest campaigner has been allowed to go around promoting disaffection between the country’s biggest majority (the poor) and the smallest minority (the rich). Not satisfied with fanning resentment between the two, the Congress has gone a step further by openly talking about wealth redistribution — the socialist equivalent of Pearl Harbour.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am no genius at economics, nor do I have the beautiful mathematical mind of a Russell Crowe. But all said and done, economics is not rocket science, or even science. Some of you may have seen this popular economics column called ‘No proof is required, hence proved’. I’d say that’s a pithy summary of how intelligent people should approach economic questions such as wealth redistribution. So, I’m going to clear the air on the redistribution debate by relying on my own economic common sense and mathematical prowess instead of turning to overrated experts. So, bear with me and you shall be rewarded with unprecedented insights.

On the key question, let’s be clear: wealth redistribution happens all the time. Regardless of which party is in power. But there are two kinds of wealth redistribution. There is the good kind, which promotes social stability by locking everyone in their designated place in the social order, just like in the caste system. Then there is the bad kind, which disrupts the traditional social order by increasing unnecessary social mobility between different rungs of the class ladder. 

The poor are happy

Over the past decade, India has witnessed healthy redistribution of the good kind — from the poor and middle classes to the billionaire elite. Till date, all evidence points to everyone being happy with this arrangement. The rich are happy — obviously, because they have gotten richer. And the poor are happy, because they have got a temple, plus the sense of belonging that comes with being part of a WhatsApp group. What more do the poor need to keep up with their identity of being poor?

This column is a satirical take on life and society.

However, this arrangement is now under threat from the Congress’ proposal to redistribute wealth in the reverse direction — from the rich to the poor and middle classes. First of all, this is against the laws of nature — if it weren’t, there would be no inequality in the world and your uncle would be as rich as Elon Musk (without actually being Elon Musk). Secondly, the very idea is petty and downright insulting, to the country’s millions of non-HNIs.

Why does the Congress think so little of the toiling masses that have successfully sustained the nation’s privileged elite for millennia? As per the World Inequality Database, India’s top 1% (the wealthiest) own just 40.1% of all wealth. If my calculations are right, then that’s not even half the country’s wealth. This means most of the nation’s wealth — 59.9% — is already in the hands of the majority (the 99%). India has a population of 140 crore (source: PM’s speeches). Now, 1% of that is 1.40 crore. 140 crore minus 1.40 crore is — I dare any economist to tell me I’m wrong — 138.60 crore. Can anyone seriously argue that 138.60 crore people can’t support 1.40 crore people? But that’s exactly what the Congress party’s ‘revolutionary’ manifesto is suggesting! Why? It’s simple: they want to fill the hearts and minds of the poor with resentments against the rich. 

Obsession with unemployment

This whole rich-poor rhetoric is so 1960s, it’s ridiculous. Same goes for the Congress campaign’s obsession with unemployment. Who in their right mind talks about jobs in the age of AI and entrepreneurship? Today, every Indian, be they rich or poor, aspires to be a wealth creator, not a job-seeker. That’s why the Congress banging on about so-called joblessness is despicable. It’s nothing but a desperate bid to garner votes by polarising the electorate into employment-seekers and employment-deniers. If this is not a clear-cut case of hate speech against the nation’s wealthy minority, I don’t know what is. 

And yet, the EC is reluctant to stop politicians from making incendiary references to redistribution and jobs. Let’s hope better sense prevails soon and it clamps down on this phenomenon with the same alacrity with which it has cracked down on communal rhetoric.

The author of this satire is Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu.

sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

Women planting paddy seedlings in an agricultural field in Nagaon district of Assam.
| Photo Credit: Ritu Raj Konwar

On March 11, Bahutva Karnataka, a forum for concerned citizens and organisations, released a report titled ‘Employment, Wages and Inequality’, at the Press Club, Bengaluru. The report analyses the progress in various employment-related indicators in the last decade, ever since the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came to power, including employment generation, formalisation of jobs, and improvement in wages.

As the general elections draw near, the report also examines the progress of the NDA’s employment-related initiatives. In April 2019, for instance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that 2.5 crore jobs have been added annually. Data reveal that the share of formal employment with social security and other advantages attached to it has remained stagnant. On the other hand, the number of self-employed individuals has increased substantially. Further, while wage earnings have increased when adjusted for inflation, the increase is negligible.

The stagnation is reflected in the share of households earning less than the national floor level minimum wage (NFLMW). About 34% of households in India earned less than the proposed NFLMW of Rs. 375 a day. Further, wage inequality has resulted in widening the gap between the rich and the poor. In 2022, the top 1% and 10% of the population held 22% and 57% of the national income, respectively, while the bottom 50% held 12.7%, according to data from the World Inequality Database.

Chart 1 | The charts compare the share of employment across various employment categories in 2011-12 and 2022-23 for men and women.

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Data show that the share of employment in the formal sector remained below 25%. The share of those who were self-employed remained above 50% by 2022-23. While the share of self-employed women was the highest, it also saw the highest growth of 8% points from 56.5% in 2011-12 to 64.3% in 2022-23. According to the report, between 2011-12 and 2022-23, women doing unpaid labour in their family business or farming rose from one in four to one in three due to lack of other remunerative employment and stagnant household earnings.

Also read:Top 1% Indians’ share in national income is higher now than under British-rule: Data

Chart 2 | The chart shows the year-wise average weekly wages, adjusted for inflation, for male and female regular salaried workers and casual labourers.

Data show there has not been any significant growth in income in the last five years across employment categories.

Further, many households still earn less than the NFLMW (Map 3). In 2019, an expert committee, set up by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, recommended that the NFLMW should be at least Rs. 375 per day and Rs. 3,050 per week. Of the 34 States and Union Territories (UTs) analysed, in about 19 of them, more than 20% earned less than Rs. 375 a day or less than Rs. 3,050 a week in 2022-23. In Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh, above 50% of the households earned less than this threshold. The report adds that nearly 30 crore workers make less than the minimum wage.

Map 3 | The map shows the State/UT-wise share of households earning less than the national floor level minimum wage

The stagnancy in income growth among the majority of the population, when juxtaposed with India’s increased GDP per capita, hints at a widening gap between the rich and poor. In the last 10 years, GDP per capita increased by 60%, while close to 35% of the total households earned less than the NFLMW. The share of national wealth held by the wealthiest 10% of the population increased from 63% in 2012 to 64.5% in 2022, while the share held by the poorest 50% reduced further from 6.1% in 2012 to 5.6% in 2022 (Chart 4). The chart shows the year-wise wealth share of the top 10% and the bottom 50% of the population.

Chart 4 | The chart shows the year-wise share of national wealth held by the top 10% and bottom 50% of the population.

Source: ‘Employment, Wages and Inequality’ report

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