Extension: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025, awarded in part to Joel Mokyr

Record: kaal:position:2026-10-13-002 · 2026-10-13

Mokyr locates the cultural origins of modern growth in the Republic of Letters, a transnational market for ideas in which participants competed for reputation earned by contributions that withstood scrutiny. The protected claim specifies reputation that is domain-specific, bound to the holder's identity, earned only through validated work, and incapable of sale, loan or transfer. Kaal's position is that the Republic of Letters exhibited those properties: credit was scoped to fields, attached to the contributor, earned by work that survived scrutiny, and not purchasable. The essay adds two further properties, citation weighting and the speed of the postal service, which the protected claim does not address.

• The Nobel citation is an award summary. It is not an empirical test of this classification.
• The protected claim describes reputation in a designed agent system under its stake model. Applying its properties to an early modern correspondence network is Kaal's own extension.
• The classification concerns the properties of the reputation mechanism, not the social composition of the Republic of Letters, which excluded most people.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025, awarded in part to Joel Mokyr

kaal:claim:7596939-006
Wulf A. Kaal, Should an Intelligent Agent Have Legal Rights? (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7596939
Source PDF sha256: aa3ba2287a9f0fa2529e1c92bd6c509cdc4697fafe2de73d11877c44e592f39c

reputationinstitutional-designscholarly-literature

Affirmed in kaalvis:2026-10-13:next-enlightenment-essay-nine-v1 on 2026-10-13. Review record.

Canonical markdown sha256: be2b275e723d70d04c8438cdffc27b71de0773ad86be95a383962f5991f0ff64
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-10-13-002.md | sha256sum