If the awarding of any Nobel this past week can be read as a rebuke to President Donald Trump, it isn’t the Peace Prize. The notion of Trump as Peace Prize laureate was always grotesque. As TNR’s Alex Shephard noted, Gaza or no Gaza, “He is running an increasingly violent, murderous, and despotic government.” And anyway, the actual winner, Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado, sees herself as a Trump ally.
No, it’s the awarding of a Nobel prize in economics to Northwestern’s Joel Mokyr (along with Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France and Peter Howitt of Brown) that’s the real spit in Trump’s eye.
This rebuke may not seem obvious, given that press coverage of the award focuses mostly on Aghion and Howitt’s mathematical models of “creative destruction,” the economic principle Joseph Schumpeter introduced in 1942. Destruction is one of the Trump administration’s favorite pursuits as it targets government agencies and rival power centers.
But let’s clear up a misconception. Silicon Valley egomaniacs and, I suspect, Project 2025 architect and White House budget chief Russell Vought wrongly think Schumpeter intended to praise destruction by calling it “creative.” Not true! As I explained in my 2023 review of Samuel W. Franklin’s underappreciated book The Cult of Creativity, “creative” was not, at the time Schumpeter wrote, a term of praise. It was, rather, a neutral adjective that meant “tending to create.” An act of disruption is no work of art.
In any case, Mokyr’s work runs in a different direction. Mokyr is interested not in what must be destroyed for economic growth to flourish, but rather in what must be present. Very high on Mokyr’s list is that MAGA bête noire, the university.
The rise of universities, Mokyr writes in A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (2016), enabled “the sons of the elite” to gain exposure to “information and beliefs beyond their early socialization” and “be exposed to intellectual innovations.” Mokyr notes that the University of Wittenberg, then “barely 15 years old,” employed a professor named Martin Luther who nailed 95 theses to the church door; that Galileo “did some of his best work at the University of Padua,” where William Harvey and Nicolaus Copernicus were also graduates; and that the University of Leyden was instrumental in the spread of Newtonian physics.
“Progressive universities rose and fell,” Mokyr observes, “and few remained innovative over the very long haul. But because they were numerous … it was rare that there was not some innovative activity taking place at some university in Europe. When such intellectual innovation occurred, central authorities had difficulty suppressing it.”
The “notable technological ideas” incubated by university lectures, Mokyr observes in The Lever of Riches (1990), include:
Tesla’s polyphase electrical motor, inspired by a professor at the Graz Polytechnic; Hall’s aluminum smelting technique, which was begun after a professor at Oberlin College mentioned the possibility; and Diesel’s engine, which was first clearly defined in his mind during a lecture at the Munich Polytechnic.
Like the Beach Boys said: Be true to your school!
None of these observations may strike you as earth-shattering, but Mokyr argues that universities and other institutional components to what he calls the “Republic of Letters” (monasteries were another) were far more essential to the uniquely strong sustained economic growth in the West during the last few hundred years than is generally recognized.
He would appear to believe that’s even more true today. In a 2008 interview with Peter Marsh of the Financial Times, Mokyr said that America’s lousy mean scores in science and technology, unfortunate though they may be, will have no bearing on its prospects for future economic growth. “What matters is we have Caltech and MIT,” Mokyr said. “It is the top 0.1 percent of smart people, the whizzkids and brilliant geeks, who will move the world.”
MIT, you probably heard, is in the news because on Friday it became the first to reject Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which was sent to nine research universities: Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, and the University of Arizona.
The compact is Mokyr’s worst nightmare. It conditions future federal funding on limiting foreign students to 15 percent; allowing the federal government to dictate criteria for admissions, curricula, grading, hiring, gender identity, tuition, and student protests; agreeing, at the wealthier universities, not to charge any tuition to students in the hard sciences (except for “families of substantial means”); and remaining silent on “societal and political events.”
In her reply, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said that to the extent the compact is intended to reward merit in admissions, open doors to students who can’t afford to pay tuition, and encourage free expression, MIT already does that. But “the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” as opposed to an institution’s willingness to “restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution.”
This is all part of Trump’s much larger war on universities, including the cutoff of $4 billion in grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Medicine; revocation of visas for more than 300 students said to have taken part in demonstrations protesting Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza; a shakedown of Columbia University for $200 million and assorted concessions, including the government-approved appointment of a university monitor; the freezing of $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard University, which a federal judge last month ordered unfrozen; and so on.
If you think any of this is motivated by sincere concern about anti-Semitic incidents on campus (and yes, there has been an increase) then you haven’t been paying attention. Trump has a history of tolerating anti-Semitism in his own administration that is unmatched in modern memory, including from the Sieg-Heiling Elon Musk.
The real reason Trump is punishing America’s research universities is that voters in those communities don’t support him, whereas voters who lack a college degree increasingly do. Trump’s share of the non-college vote rose from 49 percent in 2016 to 51 percent in 2020 to 56 percent in 2024. Meanwhile, public confidence in universities, which approached 60 percent a decade ago, has dropped to 42 percent, according to Gallup. It was an even-lower 36 percent in 2024, the year of Trump’s re-election.
The reasons for this decline are not as straightforward (wokeism, elitism) as is often supposed. A lot of the resentment has to do with rising tuition costs at state universities, which means that a lot of academia’s detractors, far from wanting to hurt universities, just want to get in. And indeed, 56 percent of the public doesn’t support Trump’s war on higher education, according to a May poll by the Associated Press. The Republican base, though, loves it, with about 80 percent telling AP they approved of Trump’s higher-ed policies. That was higher approval than Republicans gave Trump for his handling of the economy.
But if Mokyr’s work is right then we aren’t going to have a strong economy if we let our colleges and universities go to seed. The United States is the world’s leader in higher education, but according to Inside Higher Education, that lead was slipping even before Trump started slashing university grants and revoking foreign-student visas. As recently as 2018, 125 American universities placed among the top 500 in the world. In 2025, that’s down to 102. If this trend continues, the United States won’t just lose its pre-eminence in higher education; it will lose its pre-eminence in the global economy.
That’s how I read Mokyr. By giving him a Nobel, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is telling Trump that his undermining of American universities is lousy economics. I doubt he’ll notice, but this is the real insult—and it’s richly deserved.
The post Another Nobel Prize That Trump Will Never Win: Economics appeared first on New Republic.
