Joel Mokyr
Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University (Michigan, United States).

Main works related to the European miracle
1990: The Lever of Riches – Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1990.

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My personal and subjective view of Mokyr's contribution to the Grand Question
Joel Mokyr displays limited scholarship in history of civilizations in his The Lever of Riches (1990). He covers only Western Europe and China, neglecting almost entirely the Middle East, India and the other East Asian countries.
He weighs in the impact of political factors on science&technology and on economic growth. He rightfully uses China as a benchmark for any contention. But he misses the point because of his limited knowledge of Chinese history. Indeed, he assumes that China was continuously politically united up to modern times (p.236). From that false assumption on, he gets lost, because he cannot see that the highly changing progressiveness of the Chinese governments is directly linked to the macro-political situation. Progressiveness is great when China is stably divided, and non-existent or even negative when it is united. This is pretty clear when sifting consciously across the whole of Chinese history (cf. Le Secret de l'Occident, pp209-264). Mokyr thereupon embarks for a long and boring comparison between evolution in biology and scientific progress in a civilization, unaware, like many others, that comparing is not explaining. A ressemblance might be purely superficial. Thus, Mokyr remains within cinematics and does not enter dynamics.
Mokyr's book, however, is much better than his theory. It is a lively historical account, displaying a wide scholarship in history of technology.