Nobel Prize in Economics 2025 awarded to Joel Mokir, Philip Aghion and Peter Howitt
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced that the 2025 Swedish State Bank Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to Joel Mokir, Philip Aghion and Peter Howitt “for explaining economic growth driven by innovation”. About this going in the message of the Nobel Committee.
Half of the prize was awarded to Joel Mokir from Northwestern University (USA) “for defining the prerequisites for sustainable growth through technological progress”. In his research, Mokir turned to historical sources to show why sustainable economic growth became the possible norm.
“He showed that in order for innovations to continuously replace each other in a self-generating process, it is necessary not only to know that something works, but also to have scientific explanations for why it is so. Such explanations were often lacking before the industrial revolution, which made it difficult for new discoveries and inventions to develop. He also emphasized how important it is for society to be open to new ideas and allow change to happen, the committee said in a statement.
The other half of the prize will be shared by Philippe Aghion from the Collège de France and INSEAD (France), the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), and Peter Howitt from Brown University (USA) “for the theory of sustainable growth through creative destruction”.
Aghion and Howitt in their 1992 work created a mathematical model of the process of creative destruction: when a new, more advanced product appears on the market, companies selling outdated products lose their positions.
“The work of the laureates demonstrates that economic growth cannot be taken for granted. We must support mechanisms that ensure creative destruction to avoid a return to stagnation,” emphasized John Hassler, chairman of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee.
