Nobel Prize in economics recipient Joel Mokyr is working on a book with two Irish economists, including Morgan Kelly, the University College Dublin (UCD) professor who raised the alarm in 2006 about the Irish property bubble.
“[We] are working on a book together about the industrial revolution in Britain,” said Cormac Ó Gráda, emeritus professor of economics at UCD, referring to Prof Mokyr.
“It doesn’t have a title yet. Morgan and I were working separately on it and Joel was interested and I roped him in,” he said.
Prof Mokyr, from Northwestern University in the US, published a book about the Irish famine in 1983 – Why Ireland Starved; A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850, that had a big impact on Irish scholarship, Prof Ó Gráda said.
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It was while he was working on that book that Prof Mokyr, a Dutch-born US-Israeli economic historian, first met Prof Ó Gráda.
“We’ve been friends since that time,” he said after Prof Mokyr had been announced as a Nobel prize winner, along with two other economists.
“I’m still buzzing. I’ve been talking to him a few times already today. We are close friends.”
Prof Ó Gráda said that before the announcement he had joked to his friend that he would win a Nobel Prize.
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“He said he’s more likely to become a pope. He’s Jewish.”
Prof Ó Gráda, who has co-authored papers with Prof Mokyr, said the book on the British industrial revolution was “half done and I suppose this Nobel Prize thing will delay it a bit. So Morgan and I will have to step up”.
Prof Mokyr’s book on the Irish famine came about when, in the late 1970s, he had finished a book about the Belgian and Dutch economies in the nineteenth century and was looking around for a “loser economy” to study. “Someone suggested Ireland.”
