Why are veterinarian bills getting so ruff on the wallet?

Summary

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The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode: Why are veterinarian bills getting so ruff on the wallet?
Date: October 20, 2025
Host: Greg Rosalski (NPR)
Guest: Joel Mokyr (Economic Historian, Nobel Laureate)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into a fresh Nobel Prize in Economics—awarded for groundbreaking work on growth and innovation—and uses the achievements of economic historian Joel Mokyr to unpack the engines behind centuries of technological progress. With Mokyr’s expertise, the hosts trace how humanity's approach to knowledge and societies’ openness to change have shaped economic growth, emphasizing why our era of constant innovation might be more fragile than we think.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Celebrating the Nobel Prize in Economics

• The episode opens with excitement over the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Economics going to leading economic historians, notably Joel Mokyr, for work on understanding the engines of technological and economic growth.
• Mokyr’s famous quip:

  "Work without economic history is like an evolutionary biologist without paleontology. And if you don't have paleontology, you just miss 99.5% of all the species that ever walked this earth."
  (00:44 – Joel Mokyr)

2. Why Did Historical Inventions Not Make People Richer?

• Hosts note that while medieval Europe produced many important inventions (eyeglasses, mechanical clocks, deep ploughs), these alone didn’t result in increased wealth for the population.
• Joel Mokyr describes pre-modern European life as marked by backbreaking labor and scarcity:

  "Terrible. Lots of hard work, backbreaking work. Always a danger of not having enough to eat. Threat of famine looming over one's life every day. Third of all, newborns died in infancy or before the day aged of one."
  (03:00 – Joel Mokyr)

3. Mokyr’s Two Kinds of Knowledge: Prescriptive vs. Propositional

• Prescriptive Knowledge: Practical instructions, how-to knowledge passed via trial and error (e.g., building cathedrals without understanding the physics).
• Propositional Knowledge: Abstract laws of nature, scientific theories (e.g., mathematics, physics), traditionally held by scholars and not widely shared with practitioners.
• Middle Ages: These two forms of knowledge were kept largely separate, hindering progress.

• "Basically the book learning wasn't meeting the street smarts."
  (04:03 – Greg Rosalski)

4. The Scientific Revolution: Merging Theory and Practice

• Around the 1600s, figures like Francis Bacon championed scientific inquiry, promoting rigorous testing, measurement, and the merging of theory with practice.
• This “feedback loop” between ideas and real-world testing fueled refinements such as improved steam engines and other industrial breakthroughs.

5. The Persuasive Power of Scientific Explanations

• When practical advice is linked to basic scientific explanations (e.g., germ theory for handwashing), new practices face less resistance, promoting faster adoption of beneficial innovations.

6. Openness to Change and Economic Institutions

• Mokyr argues: Societies grow more when their institutions are open to new technologies. Resistance often comes from those who benefit from the status quo.
• Example: The early British Parliament allowed broader advocacy for innovations like railways, benefiting more groups despite upending existing interests.
• Downside: There’s no permanent trend toward greater openness; societies can—and do—become less open, as with the global setbacks between the World Wars.

• "There is no way that we can show that they get better over time. They do go up, they do go down...and it seems that there's some evidence to show that that's what's happening today."
  (06:38 – Joel Mokyr)

7. Modern Parallels: Disruption and Resistance

• Hosts reference current tensions (e.g., coal industry decline vs. new energy technology, Hollywood writers’ strike over AI): technological progress leads to long-term prosperity, but “there are costs,” including job losses and social dislocation.

• "The price we pay for progress is bankruptcies, layoff, and dislocation. While the world as a whole is better off in the long run, there are costs."
  (07:22 – Greg Rosalski)

8. Technological Progress: Double-Edged Sword

• Mokyr emphasizes: all technologies have side effects, capable of both harm and good.

• "You make a hammer, you build a technological tool, it can be used to build a home, and it can be used to bash Abel and Cain's heads in...Gunpowder can be used to fight wars and it can be used to build tunnels."
  (08:57 – Joel Mokyr)

9. The Fragility of Sustained Growth

• Mokyr warns that the kind of relentless innovation seen over the past few centuries is vulnerable and must not be taken for granted.

• "Technological progress is like a fragile and vulnerable plant whose nourishing is not only dependent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short and can easily be arrested by relatively small external changes."
  (08:14 – Greg Rosalski, quoting Mokyr's "Lever of Riches")

10. Looking Forward: The Great Human Challenges

• Mokyr concludes by stressing that humanity’s major problems—climate change and demographic shifts—require further technological innovation:

• "The human race faces two of the greatest challenges that it has ever faced, and those are climate change and the demographic change. But given that the only way in which we can cope with this crisis is inventing ourselves out of it, I strongly urge the world to keep putting effort and money and resources and incentives to the people who [are] trying to invent us out of these two crises."
  (09:35 – Joel Mokyr)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Work without economic history is like an evolutionary biologist without paleontology."
  Joel Mokyr, 00:44

• "Terrible. Lots of hard work, backbreaking work...Threat of famine looming over one's life every day."
  Joel Mokyr, 03:00

• "Basically the book learning wasn't meeting the street smarts."
  Greg Rosalski, 04:03

• “There is no way that we can show that they get better over time. They do go up, they do go down…”
  Joel Mokyr, 06:38

• "Machines don't replace us. They move us to more interesting, more challenging work."
  Joel Mokyr, 08:00

• “Technological progress is like a fragile and vulnerable plant...whose life is almost always short and can easily be arrested...”
  Greg Rosalski (quoting Mokyr), 08:14

• “The only way in which we can cope with this crisis is inventing ourselves out of it..."
  Joel Mokyr, 09:35

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:17 – 01:01: Introduction, Nobel Prize background, Mokyr’s analogy
• 02:32 – 03:21: Medieval inventions vs. lack of wealth gains, grim realities
• 03:23 – 04:03: Prescriptive vs. propositional knowledge explained
• 04:32 – 05:12: Scientific Revolution: merging theory and practice
• 05:42 – 06:38: Role of open institutions, historical shifts in openness
• 07:22 – 07:57: Modern parallels: innovation resistance, labor disruption
• 08:00 – 08:57: AI, technology's double-edge, Mokyr’s optimism
• 09:35 – 10:12: The need for technological solutions to current crises

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Conclusion

This episode offers a brisk, insightful tour of the philosophical and institutional underpinnings of technological and economic progress. Drawing on Mokyr’s research, the conversation traces the historical merging of theory with practice, the necessity of open institutions, and the perpetual tension and fragility underlying modern prosperity. It ends as a call to action: The future depends on our collective willingness to innovate our way out of humanity’s biggest challenges.

Transcript

[NPR Announcer]

Npr.

[Greg Rosalski]

Greg Rosalski, author of the Planet Money Newsletter Ready to pop some champagne?

[Joel Mokyr]

Yeah.

[Darian]

Why are we popping champagne so early in the week?

[Greg Rosalski]

Again, it is the economics Nobel and it's the one time of the year where I'm allowed to talk about Francis Bacon and the scientific method and the Enlightenment and how that all led to the incredible discoveries and gadgets we have today.

[Darian]

I'm so happy for you, Darian. Yeah. So the award, this was a huge win for economic historians, among others, Joel Mokir from Northwestern University for economics, to.

[Joel Mokyr]

Work without economic history is like an evolutionary biologist without paleontology. And if you don't have paleontology, you just miss 99.5% of all the species that ever walk to this earth.

[Darian]

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Greg Rosalski and I don't words.

[Greg Rosalski]

Today on the show we're going to answer the question of why technology keeps getting better and better. Along with Joel Mokir, Philippe Allian and Peter Howard got the economic Nobel this year for their work on understanding growth and innovation. So today we're going to focus on a part of that Joel Mokir's economic history of the European Enlightenment.

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[Greg Rosalski]

Were a lot of pretty cool inventions coming out of Europe. Eyeglasses, mechanical clocks, deep ploughs for better tilling soil. But while these were handy for short sighted people or people who needed the time or for farmers, they the inventions as a whole didn't lead to Europeans getting much richer.

[Darian]

Economist, historian and now Nobel laureate Joel Mokir described what this time was like on a previous episode of Planet Money.

[Joel Mokyr]

Terrible. Lots of hard work, backbreaking work. Always a danger of not having enough to eat. Threat of famine looming over one's life every day. Third of all, newborns died in infancy or before the day aged of one.

[Darian]

Yes, thereabout.

[Siyavash Madani]

Grim.

[Darian]

Yeah. Anyway, Joel Moir, he says to understand what happened next, you need to put the kinds of knowledge that we produce into two categories. One is what he calls prescriptive knowledge. That's like instructions and mechanics. You know, like I'm building this cathedral and, you know, I need to this many, you know, load bearing beams for something this tall with, you know, stone bricks this thick. I'm not writing out calculus equations. I'm not doing like, you know, big sky thinking. I'm just using the knowledge that has been passed on to me that's been discovered through trial and error. I probably don't know why this many beams are needed, you know, just that it works.

[Greg Rosalski]

Yeah. And then on the other side, he has what he calls propositional knowledge, basically laws of nature, things like mathematics and physics. And according to Joel Mokir, these two ways of learning were kept kind of separate. In the Middle Ages, you'd have your masons cutting the stones on the construction site over there and the wonks writing theories with their quill pens over there. But they weren't really talking to each other. It was basically the book. Learning wasn't meeting the street smarts.

[Darian]

Then around the 1600s, people like Francis Bacon in England started making waves in science. Bacon encouraged scientists to test their theories, to measure precisely, and to not be afraid of scientific inquiry as somehow, you know, blasphemous. By testing theories in the lab or out in the world, this brought together propositional and prescriptive knowledge.

[Greg Rosalski]

It all kind of seems obvious now, but Joel Mokir argues that this feedback loop between theory and testing allowed for products to be refined and improved. One example is that by understanding atmospheric pressure, the steam engine could be made better, meaning more efficient motors.

[Darian]

There's another great thing about bringing propositional knowledge into practice. It's having an explanation about how the world works. It just kind of makes your ideas more persuasive. If you just tell all the doctors to start washing their hands, they might be like, why? And you're like, I don't know, it just seems like it works better. But if you actually have like an explanation, like tiny organisms and, you know, gunk called germs and bacteria, those cause diseases, your knowledge might actually run into less resistance.

[Greg Rosalski]

Okay, so theory and practice married together at last in the scientific revolution. But there is more to it, Joel Mokia emphasizes that a country's openness to change is a key ingredient for sustained economic growth. Almost by definition, the people on top are doing pretty well from the existing technologies, and so new technologies and businesses could be a threat. In the United Kingdom, the British Parliament as we know it Today started in 1800, and this gave a voice to a broader array of people. It meant that people who could benefit from, say, more railroad connections could advocate for constructing them, even if it might be disruptive to existing businesses. The not so optimistic take, though, is that there is no obvious trend that institutions get more open to growth over time. At his Nobel press conference yesterday, Joel recalled a conversation from his colleague Douglas North.

[Joel Mokyr]

There is no way that we can show that they get better over time. They do go up, they do go down. I mean, there are periods in which institutions all over the world were getting remarkably worse, particularly the interwar period in the 20th century, say. And it seems that there's some evidence to show that that's what's happening today.

[Darian]

Yeah, this is all kind of starting to remind me of debates we're having today. I'm thinking, you know, also about the Trump administration's efforts to revive the coal industry. Coal in the US Is being largely supplanted by natural gas and renewables for new capacity, largely because of improving technology in these areas. That's maybe cold comfort, though, for miners living in Kentucky or West Virginia.

[Greg Rosalski]

Yeah, the price we pay for progress is bankruptcies, layoff, and dislocation. While the world as a whole is better off in the long run, there are costs. Like in AI. A lot of the Hollywood writers strike was about whether movies and TV shows should be allowed to use artificial intelligence. You've got a technology that speeds up part of the writing process, but vested interests like the writers union don't want that technology being used. Joel said at the Nobel press conference that that's because all technologies have side effects and can sometimes do harm.

[Darian]

That said, Joel is definitely not an AI doomer.

[Joel Mokyr]

Machines don't replace us. They move us to more interesting, more challenging work. And as AI moves us up to take these jobs over, people will move to even hired jobs.

[Greg Rosalski]

Joel McKeer thinks that this world of sustained progress that we've gotten used to is fragile. In his book Lever of Riches, he wrote, by and large, the forces opposing technological progress have been stronger than those striving for changes. He says technological progress is like a fragile and vulnerable plant whose nourishing is not only dependent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short and can easily be arrested by relatively small external changes. So he's basically saying that this kind of economic growth can't be taken for granted. But he says how we decide to use those technologies can have very different outcomes.

[Joel Mokyr]

You make a hammer, you build a technological tool, it can be used to build a home, and it can be used to bash Abel and Cain's heads in. That's, I think, something that's true across the board for technological change throughout the ages. Gunpowder can be used to fight wars and it can be used to build tunnels. And I think the same is true for the things that are on the horizon today, including artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and so on and so forth.

[Darian]

And Joel, he's betting we need technological advances to solve some of the biggest issues we're dealing with today.

[Joel Mokyr]

The human race faces two of the greatest challenges that it has ever faced, and those are climate change and the demographic change. But given that the only way in which we can cope with this crisis is inventing ourselves out of it, I strongly urge the world to keep putting effort and money and resources and incentives to the people who trying to invent us out of these two crises.

[Greg Rosalski]

By the way, if you want to read more about the economics Nobel, you should check out Greg's newsletter, npr.org planetmoneynewsletter that's npr.org planetmoneynewsletters this episode was produced and fact checked by Julia Ritchie. Engineering was done by Patrick Murray. Kate Kincannon edits the show and the indicator is a production of npr.

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