Nobel Winner Joel Mokyr Showed Apprenticeships Power Prosperity

Joel Mokyr won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for decades of work on the causes of the Industrial Revolution and the drivers of growth-inducing technological development. Mokyr’s work is far too wide-ranging to summarize in this post, but a key theme is the importance of societal institutions that bolster growth. One of these was the system of apprenticeships in England before and during the Industrial Revolution, which helped translate new technological developments into a miracle of sustained economic expansion that continues to the modern day.

Economists typically regard human capital as an indispensable ingredient in economic growth. This presents a puzzle when looking at the conditions that led to the world’s first economic expansion, the Industrial Revolution, which began in England during the late 18th century. In 1790, England had just two universities (Oxford and Cambridge) for its population of 9.3 million. Per capita, France had four times as many institutions of higher learning, while Prussia had seven times as many as England. In addition, fewer of England’s youngsters enrolled in primary schools compared to their continental peers.

But the secret sauce behind English human capital did not lie in formal schooling. Rather, as Mokyr put it in a 2014 paper coauthored with Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda: “The main source of the high level of technical competence lay in Britain’s system of professional training through apprenticeship.”

“The English school system was not impressive by contemporary standards,” write Mokyr and his coauthors. “However, the decisive group during the Industrial Revolution was artisans, and nearly all artisans were trained as apprentices by other artisans.”

Micro-inventions and continuous improvement

A few big names tend to dominate discussion of innovation during the Industrial Revolution—James Watt and the steam engine, Richard Arkwright and the water frame. But just as important, argue Mokyr and Ralf Meisenzahl in a 2012 paper, were the far greater ranks of skilled technicians and artisans who “who were able to adapt, implement, improve, and tweak new technologies,” tinkering until the novel machines ran far more efficiently. These skilled tradesmen—including “engineers, mechanics, millwrights, chemists, clock- and instrument makers, skilled carpenters and metal workers, wheelwrights, and similar workmen,” also repurposed industrial technologies for new applications and contexts.

Most of these tinkerers learned their skills through apprenticeship. In their paper, Mokyr and Meisenzahl examine a sample of 759 “micro-inventors” and “implementers” who pioneered small innovations that collectively added up to more than the sum of their parts. Among those with an identifiable educational background, just one-fourth attended a university. But two-thirds had participated in an apprenticeship.

Indeed, Mokyr finds empirical evidence that apprenticeship was a more important driver of the Industrial Revolution than more traditional explanations. A 2022 paper, also coauthored with Kelly and Ó Gráda, finds that industrialization happened most rapidly in regions of England with a high density of apprentices during the 1790s. “Other variables, such as literacy, banks, and proximity to coal, have little explanatory power,” the authors write.

Another Mokyr paper, coauthored with Karine Van Der Beek and Assaf Sarid, finds that apprentices to millwrights (carpenters who construct and maintain watermills), “had a persistent effect on the mechanization of textile- and iron-making and on the economic expansion that was taking place on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.” New inventions like the Arkwright water frame boosted watermills’ production exponentially. But the English economy required skilled craftsmen—who built, maintained, and improved those mills—to realize the full potential of what all those new gizmos could offer.

Apprenticeships can still power economic growth

“Clearly, [apprenticeship] was an example of a well-functioning informal, private-order institution, on which much of the British economy depended,” wrote Mokyr in his 2009 magnum opus, The Enlightened Economy. Apprenticeship was hardly the only ingredient in England’s success. But it did supply the widespread technical knowledge and drive for continuous small improvements that allowed England to capitalize on its other advantages.

Mokyr’s conclusions hold lessons for modern America. As a share of the labor force, the United States employs far fewer apprentices than other developed nations, even as our college degree attainment is well above average. In part that is due to limited and often inefficient federal support for apprenticeships, contrasted with considerable subsidies for traditional higher education.

As Mokyr’s Nobel Prize-winning research shows, apprenticeships powered England’s Industrial Revolution. Many believe America is now at the dawn of another economic transformation, as businesses integrate artificial intelligence into production processes. Perhaps apprenticeships can help modern America flourish throughout that transition as well.

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