Why the West Grew Rich. How a Civilization Decided That Ideas Must Compete and That Ordinary Work Carries Divine Dignity – and Why It Can Be Lost

Begin with two heretics and one fire between them. In 1415 the Czech priest Jan Hus was summoned to the Council of Constance under a promise of safe conduct, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake. In 1517 a German monk named Martin Luther nailed his objections to a church door in Wittenberg and said, in substance, the very things Hus had said a hundred years before. Luther died in his own bed, an old man, the most famous author in Europe. Nothing had changed about the courage of the two men or the danger of the idea. What had changed was the structure of the world around them.

Joel Mokyr, the economic historian who won the 2025 Nobel Prize for asking this exact question, states the difference plainly. "In 1415, Jan Hus still ended up at the stake in Constance, because the emperor and the pope were able to work together. A century later this strategy no longer worked, and the Reformation could not be stopped." The reason was not that Europe had grown gentle; Mokyr is blunt that the opposite was true. The reason was that Europe had grown fragmented, and a heretic in a fragmented continent has somewhere to run. When Luther was condemned, a German prince hid him in a castle and let him translate the Bible in peace. No single authority could reach across every border to silence him, and once the printing presses multiplied, "any such suppression would only mean that the persons targeted would flee elsewhere."

This is the load-bearing idea of the whole lecture, and Mokyr gives it in one sentence: "What emerged in medieval Europe, and turned out to be of great importance, is that political fragmentation was coupled with an intellectual and cultural unity, an integrated market for ideas." A thinker silenced in Paris printed in Amsterdam and was read in Kraków. That combination, Mokyr argues, "holds the key to the dramatic intellectual changes after 1500."

Why does any of this belong in a lecture on why the West grew rich? Because the wealth came later, and it came out of the ideas. For almost the whole of human history there was no growth to speak of. In 1754 David Hume, surveying all of economic history, concluded that "stature and force of body, length of life, even courage and genius, seem hitherto to have been in all ages pretty much the same." He was, Mokyr notes, "spectacularly incorrect" – but only about the future, because within a generation of his writing the line that had been flat for ten thousand years bent sharply upward and never came back down. "The world today is richer than it has ever been," Mokyr writes. "We know what happened, and we know more or less how and where it happened. What remains very much a mystery is why."

His answer is the argument of this hour. The West grew rich for a stranger reason than better soil or a lucky vein of gold. It grew rich because it changed its mind about knowledge – it decided that ideas should compete in the open, that they should be tested by whether they work, and that no authority, however holy, had the right to close the debate. Prosperity, in this telling, is applied philosophy. And because it began as a decision, it can be un-decided.

Picture what fragmentation made possible. Across all those borders ran an invisible country with no capital and no king – a network of scholars who wrote to one another in Latin and judged one another's work. Contemporaries called it the Republic of Letters, and Mokyr treats it as the beating heart of the story. It ran on a handful of rules everyone obeyed: freedom of entry, the right to challenge any claim no matter who made it, indifference to which country you came from, and a duty to place whatever you discovered into the open where others could use it.

Read those rules again and notice that they describe a market – a competitive market for ideas, where the currency is reputation. Knowledge is a strange good: once you have it you cannot easily stop others from sharing it, so by ordinary economic logic almost nobody should bother to produce it. The Republic of Letters solved that riddle by an accident of vanity. A scholar who made a discovery rushed to publish, because only in public could he be known as its author and watch his reputation grow. "The growth of open science," Mokyr writes, "did not occur by any conscious design. It was an emergent property, the unintended consequence of a different phenomenon: scholars trying to build reputations among their peers." Open science was open source before the word existed.

Here is the part that should matter to a reader in Lviv or Kharkiv. This republic had no centre, and so it had no periphery. Its citizens included a scholar in Dubrovnik, a Greek under Ottoman rule, a Pole in Kraków – men from the edges of Europe who were full members because the only passport was the quality of your argument. One of its favourite mottoes, borrowed from Pierre Bayle, held that "we are all equal, because we are all the children of Apollo." A young person on the eastern rim of Europe, then as now, was no spectator of this civilization. He was a potential citizen of it, on exactly equal terms, the moment he had something true to say.

Two men became its patron saints, and the striking thing is whom the age chose. Voltaire named the three greatest men who had ever lived and picked Bacon, Locke, and Newton – natural philosophers, not conquerors. "The generals and ministers will have to wait," he added. The men who built the modern political world thought its real founders were two English students of nature.

Francis Bacon – who has his own entry elsewhere in this archive – sold the culture one revolutionary idea: that knowledge should have a job. The odd thing, Mokyr delights in pointing out, is that Bacon was a poor scientist who "knew no mathematics" and rejected most of the real discoveries of his own age. It did not matter; "he did not have to be correct on all issues. He only had to be influential." What he did was insist that "the true and legitimate goal of the sciences is to endow human life with new discoveries and resources" – that an idea earns its keep when it feeds people and heals them. And the test he proposed for whether an idea was any good was breathtakingly practical. Robert Boyle, one of his heirs, put it in terms a farmer would understand: "I shall not dare to think myself a true Naturalist till my skill can make my garden yield better herbs and flowers, or my orchard better fruit, or my field better corn, or my dairy better cheese than theirs that are strangers to physiology." The question you asked of an idea was no longer whether it agreed with Aristotle. It was whether it made better cheese.

If Bacon supplied the ambition, Isaac Newton supplied the proof. Where Bacon's promises "were in the end little more than hopeful, Newton's were affirmative." A shy and secretive man who wrote his masterpiece deliberately obscure so that only real mathematicians could follow it, Newton nonetheless persuaded educated Europe of something enormous: that the universe ran on knowable rules a human mind could actually grasp and, in time, turn to use. And he handed the future its working motto, a line of pure intellectual humility: "to explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after you." Knowledge was now a relay race with no finish line, and that single expectation, built into the culture, is what let growth compound instead of fizzling out.

Every good argument needs a control group, and history handed this one a nearly perfect example: China. The temptation is to explain the West's success by some innate superiority, and the honest way to kill it is to look hard at a civilization that had every ingredient and did not ignite. Mokyr insists we begin by clearing away the condescension. "China in the mid-eighteenth century was hardly a backward economy," he writes. It was commercial, monetized, governed by a trained professional bureaucracy chosen on merit, with enforced property rights and functioning markets that by some measures matched Europe's as late as 1750. It was a land of books, its printing exploding. The gap was not a gap in raw human talent. "There was nothing wrong with China per se," Mokyr writes, "but in Europe and in Europe alone something quite unusual took place."

So what was the difference? It was who controlled the market for ideas. China was one vast unified empire, and Hume saw the consequence as early as 1742: in China "the authority of one teacher was propagated easily from one corner of the empire to another," and once an orthodoxy was received "none had the courage to resist the torrent of popular opinion." One empire meant one censor, and there was no border to slip across. Europe's censorship was just as eager, Mokyr stresses, but it "was not coordinated across political units and hard to enforce." A banned book crossed a river and was printed anyway. In China the suppression came from a single centre, and it worked.

The sharpest instrument was the examination system, and here the lesson is subtle. China's civil service was a genuine meritocracy, and that was exactly the trap. To rise, a clever young man spent his life memorizing the classics and reproducing an approved orthodoxy in a punishing sequence of exams, in which "innovation, pluralism, and contestability were largely stigmatized." A brilliant mind was rewarded for uncritical mastery of inherited wisdom and punished for challenging it. Mokyr's most unsettling point is that a meritocracy can be a more effective form of conservatism than an inquisition. The Inquisition burned dissidents and made martyrs; the exam simply made challenge unrewarding, and quietly redirected the ablest people of every generation into defending the past.

To feel the cost, meet the men who could have been China's Bacon. Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) was a high official who believed in practical application, worked with the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, converted to Christianity, co-translated Euclid into Chinese, and wrote a vast agricultural treatise full of his own experiments. Mokyr treats him with real respect: "Xu's work perhaps serves as an indication of where Chinese intellectual innovators could have gone had they lived in a different polity." A Bacon appeared in China; the polity around him did not let him ignite. The point is about the soil the seed fell into. Take, too, Li Zhi, a heterodox philosopher Mokyr rates "as serious a threat as Martin Luther was in Europe." Where Luther found a prince to shelter him, Li Zhi was arrested, and even the enfeebled late Ming state could coordinate his silencing well enough that he died in prison by his own hand. Same fire. Different structure. Opposite end.

And notice the tell, the perfect mirror of Europe's habit. Europe borrowed shamelessly – its numerals from India through the Arabs, its algebra and its very word for alcohol from Arabic – and felt no shame in learning from strangers. In China, to make foreign knowledge admissible at all, a scholar often had to argue it had been secretly Chinese all along; one convinced the emperor that European mathematics was originally Chinese learning that had wandered off and come home. A culture confident enough to admit it has something to learn compounds faster than one that must pretend it already knew everything. That openness of the market for ideas – and no innate advantage in any people – is the difference the control group reveals.

Fragmentation kept the market for ideas open, but a market needs sellers, and here the deepest question is about motive. Why pour a lifetime into disciplined labour whose fruit you might never enjoy? Max Weber's famous answer turns on a distinction so fine that most who invoke his name get it backwards.

The distinction is between greed and an ethic. Greed, Weber insists, explains nothing, because greed is everywhere and always has been. "The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money," he wrote, "has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars." The Latin poets had a phrase for it – auri sacra fames, the accursed hunger for gold – and that hunger, he says, "is as old as the history of man." A Neapolitan cab-driver, he notes drily, out-greeds any Puritan.

The novelty lay in the shape the wanting took: a duty. Making money honestly becomes "a peculiar ethic," and "the infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty." Work had become a moral act, and the root of that new seriousness was religious. Here we must be careful, for Weber refused to overstate it. He did not claim Protestantism caused capitalism – older capitalist enterprise long predated the Reformation, and he says so – only that the Reformation gave disciplined work a religious sanction it had never had, handing capitalism its inner moral engine.

The key was a single word. Translating the Bible into German, Luther needed a word for the station God assigns each person, and used Beruf – calling. "Like the meaning of the word, the idea is new," Weber writes, "a product of the Reformation." The ancient and medieval world had ranked the contemplative life above the working one: Aristotle placed contemplation at the summit of flourishing and thought manual labour fit mainly for slaves, and the medieval Church, following Aquinas, ranked the monk in his cell above the farmer in his field. Luther inverted that hierarchy. The way to please God, he taught, lay "solely through the fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling." The arena of holiness moved from the cloister to the plough.

This is the moment the dignity of ordinary work enters Western civilization, and Weber states it as sharply as can be: "every legitimate calling has exactly the same worth in the sight of God." The scholar and the milkmaid stood equal before heaven. (The image of God milking the cow through the milkmaid is Luther's own; Weber does not use it, but his colder sentence carries the same charge.) Here the lecture reaches back to the sixteenth in this archive, on ownership as stewardship: if the humblest work is holy, then capital is a trust to be tended and handed on rather than loot to be seized.

The Calvinists turned this into an engine of terrifying power. Their doctrine of predestination taught that God had, from eternity, already chosen the saved and the damned, and nothing you did could change it. Weber describes the "unprecedented inner loneliness" it produced – no priest, no sacrament, finally not even the Church could reassure you. Out of that dread came a world-remaking counsel: since you could not know whether you were chosen, you sought the sign of election in relentless work, because "intense worldly activity … and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace." Idleness became the deadliest of sins. Anxiety about eternity, poured into labour and reinvested instead of spent, produced the modern economy almost as a by-product.

And then, in the most haunting passage he ever wrote, Weber mourned what became of it. The Puritan had chosen his work as a light cloak he could throw off at any moment. "But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage." (The English "iron cage" is his translator Talcott Parsons' rendering of Weber's stahlhartes Gehäuse – a "casing hard as steel," a shell you are sealed inside rather than bars you can see.) The religion drained away, and the machine it had built ran on. "The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so," he wrote. The old faith now "prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs," and the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its soul, decays into mere sport. He ended with a warning no house rule of this archive may soften, because it is his own and not ours: the last men of this civilization might be "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." The man who best explained why the West grew rich was the first to fear what a rich West might forget.

There is one more leg to this argument, and it returns us to the very first room of this archive. If prosperity grows from an open market for ideas, what happens when someone proposes to close it – to replace the competition of a thousand minds with a single plan drawn up by the wisest experts? Friedrich Hayek spent a wartime book answering that, and his answer is, at bottom, Socratic.

Recall what the Delphic oracle said of Socrates: that he was the wisest man in Athens – and what Socrates concluded it must mean, that he alone knew that he knew nothing, while everyone else was certain of things they did not understand. Hayek's central argument is that the planner is the exact opposite of the Socratic man: he is the one who does not know that he does not know. The knowledge an economy runs on, Hayek insists, exists in no single head. It is scattered across millions of people, each holding a fragment no one else holds. No planner, however brilliant, can gather it all. "Why he should have to move to another occupation, why some things he wants should become more difficult to get than others, will always be connected with such a multitude of circumstances that no single mind will be able to grasp them."

This is why Hayek makes the astonishing claim that a free order is superior precisely because of what its designers admit they cannot know. It "may appear paradoxical," he grants, "to claim as a virtue that under one system we shall know less … that a method of social control should be deemed superior because of our ignorance of its precise results." It is Socratic humility built into an institution. And here is the same idea explaining the wealth: "if we had had to rely on conscious central planning for the growth of our industrial system, it would never have reached the degree of differentiation, complexity, and flexibility it has attained." The West grew rich by using knowledge no one person possessed.

That is the quiet half of Hayek's warning; the loud half is darker, and for a Ukrainian reader it is close to the bone. Hayek asks why the attempt to run a whole society by plan ends, again and again, in the hands of its cruelest men, and his answer is structural rather than a slur against any nation. A plan requires that everyone agree on a single ranking of ends, and large numbers of people agree only on the crudest things. Worse, "it is easier for people to agree on a negative program – on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off – than on any positive task." The plan therefore needs an enemy, and Hayek names the two the twentieth century actually used in a single breath: "the enemy, whether he be internal, like the 'Jew' or the 'kulak,' or external, seems to be an indispensable requisite in the armory of a totalitarian leader."

Read that word – kulak – slowly. Writing in London in 1944, Hayek set the machinery of the Holodomor beside that of the Nazi camps and saw one mechanism in both. The plan names a class of people as the obstacle, and then "the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power." This is the living logic of the state that, as these words are read, is trying to erase the country in which they are read.

And Hayek reserved a special contempt for the claim that any of this was inevitable – that history was marching toward central planning and resistance was merely naïve. "The myth is deliberately cultivated," he wrote, "that we are embarking on the new course not out of free will but because" the times compel it. He called this "devoid of foundation," an assertion "taken over by one writer from another until, by mere iteration, it has come to be accepted as an established fact." Notice the rhyme, because this archive has fought this exact enemy before. Every doctrine that tells you the future is already decided – that Spirit or History has settled the question and your choices are theatre – is running the same trick. Inevitability is the planner's anaesthetic; it numbs resistance by telling you the door is already locked. It is a lie, and telling it apart from the truth is the whole of a free person's work.

This archive does not sell clean victories, and an hour this triumphant owes you an honest accounting of where it is weakest.

Start with Weber, because the strongest objection to Weber is Weber. He knew his thesis could be turned into a slogan, and forbade it in advance. "We have no intention whatever," he wrote, "of maintaining such a foolish and doctrinaire thesis as that the spirit of capitalism could only have arisen as the result of certain effects of the Reformation." On his last page he refused even to claim he had proven his case: it is "not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history." He called his own book a sketch. The debate he started, in one scholar's words, still has "not gone off the boil" a century later, and a serious rival account – R. H. Tawney's – argues that Weber leaned too hard on doctrine and too lightly on the social and economic soil it grew in. Take the moral engine as real, and the disclaimer as equally real.

Mokyr is just as candid about the fragility of his own story. The rise of the West, he insists, was "a closely fought outcome." There was "nothing inexorable about" it; a few minor rewrites of history – a different result at Waterloo, a victorious Armada – and the Republic of Letters "would have turned into a benighted theocracy," the whole Enlightenment stillborn. He is equally firm that Europe was not innately superior: the right question, he says, is "not anything like 'why China failed' (it did not)." The fire caught in Europe, and it might have caught elsewhere, and no law says it had to catch at all.

Hayek needs the most careful handling, because he is the easiest to caricature – routinely painted as a man who would let the poor starve to keep the market pure. He said the opposite, in plain words, in the very book we have been reading. "There is no reason," he wrote, "why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the first kind of security" – security against hunger, "some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing" – "should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom." He endorsed state-organized social insurance and public relief for the victims of floods and earthquakes. The line he drew was fine: a floor beneath which no one falls is compatible with freedom, while a guarantee of everyone's relative position is not, because it requires abolishing the very market the floor sits on. A reader who thinks Hayek was against all government has not read him. He was against the substitution of one plan for the judgement of everyone.

And Hayek refused to let his own book harden into prophecy. Twelve years on he wrote that "the hot socialism against which it was mainly directed … is nearly dead in the Western world," and warned readers against reading The Road to Serfdom as a prediction that welfare states must slide into tyranny. It was a warning about a direction of travel, offered by a man who dedicated the book "to the socialists of all parties" and meant it without irony – written to persuade the people he disagreed with, in the good-faith hope of saving them from a road he thought they could not see. That is the tone to keep – the tone of an argument addressed to a friend.

There is a last honesty, and it cuts against the whole triumphant mood of this hour. Arguments about why the West grew rich curdle very easily into smugness – into a story a comfortable civilization tells itself to feel deservedly superior to everyone poorer. Every thinker here guarded against that curdling. Mokyr wrote a whole chapter to refute the idea that Europeans were innately better. Weber closed his essay in dread of the "specialists without spirit" the process might leave behind. Hayek addressed his opponents as friends. The prosperity was real and the philosophy behind it was real, and the moment you use either as a reason to sneer, you have stopped doing the thing that produced them and started doing the thing that ends them.

Gather the four arguments into one, because they are finally one argument. Mokyr showed that the West grew rich when it let ideas compete in an open market that no ruler could close. Bacon and Newton taught that culture to give knowledge a job and to expect every answer to be overtaken by a better one. Weber found the moral engine that made ordinary people work and save and build as though their labour were holy. Hayek explained why the alternative – one wise plan imposed from a single centre – must fail, because the knowledge it needs lives nowhere but in the scattered heads of everyone, and why the men who promise to impose it are so often the worst. Put together, they describe a single discovery: that a civilization becomes rich by submitting to a discipline, the discipline of letting its own best ideas be challenged and tested, and thrown out when they fail.

That is the deep meaning of a market for ideas. It is neither a free-for-all nor a comfort. It is a discipline – the hardest one a proud civilization can accept – the refusal to let any authority, any inherited certainty, stand exempt from the question of whether it works and whether it could be bettered. Mokyr ends his great book on exactly this note. The arguments of the book, he writes, "will be challenged and questioned by many others. That, in the end, is what illustrates the glory of a well functioning market for ideas." A culture is healthy in the measure that it can bear to have its own best ideas contested. The open market is the engine of wealth because it is first an engine of correction.

You are learning this in a country at war, and the war is not incidental to the lecture. On one side of that front stands the whole argument of this hour: a fragmented and open order, hungry for argument, where power is bound by fixed rules known in advance and a farmer in one village and a coder in another may build their own small good things unmolested. On the other side stands its exact opposite – the planner with an army, the single centre that decides for everyone what may be thought and said, that needs an enemy to hold itself together and has chosen its enemy, and that calls the ruin it leaves behind a liberation. Every philosopher in this lecture, from a Baconian in London to an Austrian writing under the bombs, was describing that same enemy and choosing that same side.

So the argument ends where a young person can pick it up and carry it. Prosperity was applied philosophy. It began when a civilization decided that ideas must compete, that no one is wise enough to plan another's life, and that the work of ordinary hands carries a dignity the old world had reserved for priests and kings. None of it was fated, and none of it is permanent. It was won, and it can be lost, and it is being fought over now, in Ukrainian, on the side of the open market against the planner with an army. Keep the market for ideas open. It is the thing that made everyone rich, and it is the thing worth defending – and there is no version of the story where you defend it by refusing to let it be questioned.