Mokyr’s Nobel Poses a Fundamental Question for India - What Kind of Country Does India Want to Be?

Our greatness will not come from cheap labour, vast markets, or scaling technologies invented elsewhere.

Joel Mokyr’s Nobel Prize in economics poses a fundamental question for India: beyond growth and geopolitics, what kind of country do we want to be? Whether India develops an ecosystem that promotes and rewards originality will shape not just our own future but the global economy and democratic landscape. We are the world’s largest democracy and home to one in every five of the planet’s young people. Our greatness will not come from cheap labour, vast markets, or scaling technologies invented elsewhere. It will come from becoming a society alive with ideas - one that generates knowledge, innovation, and culture.

Mokyr’s central insight is simple but profound: progress depends not just on knowledge or capital, but on culture. Innovation flourishes where knowledge is treated as a public good, where ideas are exchanged openly, sharpened through critique, and sustained by institutions that reward collaboration, risk-taking and curiosity. It was this culture of open inquiry-embodied in scientific societies, universities, and networks of correspondence that transcended borders-that turned early modern Europe into a crucible of invention and industry.

Other than small islands, this is not the prevailing spirit in India. There is a drift toward anti-intellectualism, lack of seriousness in how we talk, work, and debate . Polarization has eroded the space for good-faith disagreement, while the pursuit of visibility has displaced the pursuit of depth. Too often, our elite chase personal advancement while neglecting public purpose, imitating Western success rather than cultivating confidence at home. Instead of experimentation and inquiry, we settle for conformity and validation.

Most people want to lead decent, secure lives. But in every society, some aspire for more - for engagement, growth, and self-expression, the freedom to shape their own paths. These are the people who carry a nation forward - or leave in search of opportunity elsewhere. For India, meeting these aspirations requires more than schemes or subsidies. It demands a canvas worthy of our scale where experimentation, creativity, and civic participation are accessible without permission from power.

During a recent visit to the United States and United Kingdom after more than a decade, what struck me was that despite the West’s turn towards self-indulgent excess, there is still a sense of intellectual vitality - the churn of ideas and collaboration that makes culture feel alive. One only needs to travel in India to know this energy exists here in spades, but outside a narrow band of start-ups, it lacks outlet.

Take theater. In the West, it flourishes because it is woven into civic and economic life - supported by schools, professional productions, reviews, philanthropy. Talent gravitates toward such spaces because they sit at the intersection of creativity, discourse, commerce, and community. In India, too many fields lack this enabling architecture, leaving creative and intellectual energies scattered rather than refined and cumulative.

Indian jugaad manifests individual creativity constrained by resources. An infrastructure of knowledge, critique and collaboration, and the ability to iterate and fail would take this innate creativity and build societal innovation. Yet as a society, we lack this shared infrastructure of risk and collaboration

Two forces suppress risk. First, relative poverty inhibits individual risk-taking, and too few institutions exist to share risk or reward brave attempts. Weak rule of law and polarization make the environment unpredictable, prompting elites to retreat into safety rather than building what could be. Compounding this is the thinning of a nation-building ethos, the belief that privilege carries obligations to widen opportunity. When the civic horizon narrows, behavior oscillates between acquisition and defense, and talent is tamed instead of nurtured.

The centralization of power - not just politically but across sectors and institutions - deepens stagnation. Even well-meaning centralization reduces intellectual horizons. Meanwhile, the conflation of disagreement - both in expression and in perception - with protest and antagonism has dampened the intellectual effervescence that emerges from plurality of perspectives. This is a pity, because disagreement is first and foremost the ability to think in new ways.

In parallel, financialization and technology have made extreme wealth so visible and seemingly attainable that money, instead of remaining a means to create value, has become a value unto itself. As a result, whereas wealth once required association with public purpose for legitimacy, today wealth alone confers status and influence. For the globally connected, imitation is easier than originality, and money becomes the default measure of worth. A society that confuses wealth with value cannot sustain a deep commitment to innovation.

A country of India’s size and young population needs countless spaces for creativity and experimentation. But it also needs systems that can channel this dynamism - nurturing talent, building standards, and making whole sectors more sophisticated over time. The absence of such scaffolding is producing a quiet tragedy of wasted potential in our country.

A large section of our youth is whiling time; another is preoccupied with becoming “creators” on social media; and many of our most intelligent young people spend years cycling through competitive exams in search of stability and status. Add to this the overproduction of questionable degrees without any productive ecosystems to plug into, and the result is a vast reservoir of thwarted ambition. This is not their failure but that of a system offering too few paths to build or create.

However, when that scaffolding is built, even partially, potential that once lay dormant begins to flourish. Consider sport, where beyond cricket we were woefully behind. In recent years, however, there has been a far more deliberate effort to scout, nurture, and support talent from the ground up across disciplines. The results are beginning to show - in more medals, deeper benches, and wider public engagement with athletic excellence. What this illustrates is that India doesn’t lack raw material: intelligence, talent, chutzpah, and creativity exist here in abundance. What is missing is the institutional architecture to channel and refine them.

Intellectual excellence and innovation however cannot be engineered top-down through another government program alone. The way forward requires a broader moral and institutional imagination - one that takes the pursuit of knowledge, creativity, craft, and initiative seriously, and rewards them with purpose and dignity.

And so we return to the real question: What kind of country do we want to be? If we hope to unlock the full force of our national potential, we must expand our imagination: horizontally, by widening what we value beyond wealth and visibility to include craft, creativity, and intellectual contribution; and vertically, by building the institutions and professional capacity needed to lead globally. It would mean institutions - universities, societies, corporations, philanthropies, media - that systematically nurture ecosystems rather than merely credential talent. It would mean a culture where the pursuit of excellence in any field commands respect and creates viable pathways. We must also make a concerted effort to depolarize our public life so that honest introspection driven by the love of our country is insulated from the narrow lens of partisanship.

Only then can we rise in full confidence: rooted in who we are, open to the world, and ready to put our imprint on it.

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