I am sometimes surprised at how quickly we humans habituate to progress.

We're given something wonderful and we immediately want more of it and complain that we don't get it quickly or cheaper.

How do you think about it?

Well, as an economic historian, I think it is my mission to tell people how good they have it.

The good old days may have been old, but they weren't good.

They were terrible.

Joel Mokir is a professor at Northwestern University who recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics, along with Philippe Aguillae and Peter Howitt.

Mokir was awarded the prize for having, quote, identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress.

It is quite clear that progress is driven by a very small proportion of the population.

I would say something around maybe two, two and a half, maybe three percent of the labor force

are driving all the progress.

And what exactly do those two or three percent do?

These people change culture quite drastically.

Wait a minute.

Is Mokir saying that technological progress is

driven by culture? That is not the story a typical economist would tell us, but as you will hear

today, Mokir rarely sounds like a typical economist. It's one of the great unforced errors in history.

I mean, what we are doing is

absurd. Today, on

Freakonomics Radio, tips from

a Nobel laureate and

a new way to tell the old story

...