Economics: Three professors share the Nobel Prize 2025
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: The 2025 Nobel Prizes season closed on Monday with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarding this year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel to three economists– Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howit– “for explaining innovation-driven economic growth.”
Mokyr of Northwestern University, USA, will receive one half of the Prize for identifying the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress, while the other half will jointly be conferred on Aghion of Collège de France and Howitt of Brown University, for developing the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction, according to the media reports on Monday.
“Over the last two centuries, for the first time in history, the world has seen sustained economic growth. This has lifted vast numbers of people out of poverty and laid the foundation of our prosperity. This year’s laureates in economic sciences… explain how innovation provides the impetus for further progress,” said The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects the Nobel Laureates in various subjects.
Economics historian Mokyr, the Nobel Committee said, “used historical sources as one means to uncover the causes of sustained growth becoming the new normal.” For innovations to succeed one another in a self-generating process, it is not enough to know that something works, but scientific explanations for why it works are also essential, it said.
Aghion and Howitt also studied the mechanisms behind sustained growth.
Before the Industrial Revolution, such explanations were often missing, making it difficult to build on new discoveries and inventions, the Committee said.
In a 1992 article, they constructed a mathematical model for what is called ‘creative destruction:’ when a new and better product enters the market, the companies selling the older products lose out, the Nobel Committee said in a media release.
The Netherlands-born Joel Mokyr is Professor at Northwestern University, United States, while Philippe Aghion is Professor at Collège de France and INSEAD, Paris, and The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Peter Howitt is Professor at Brown University, United States.
Last year’s award went to three economists —Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson— whose studies explained why some countries are rich and others poor.
Formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, businessman and dynamite inventor, the Nobel Prize in Economics was established in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank.
The award, although technically not a Nobel Prize, is presented each year together with the others on December 10, the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel. The prize carries a diploma, a gold medal and a USD 1.2 million cheque.
Nobel announcements kicked off last week with the Prize for medicine/ physiology, announced on October 6, followed by those for physics, chemistry, literature, and peace.
