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\u00a9 Jonathan Nackstrand\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n\u00a9 Jonathan Nackstrand\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Congratulations to all three for \u201chaving explained innovation-driven economic growth\u201d, in the words of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences:<\/p>\n
\nOver 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\u2019s laureates in the Economic Sciences, Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, explain how innovation provides the impetus for further progress.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
One half of the SKr11mn prize goes to Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, won it \u201cfor having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress.\u201d He has specialised in the 1750-1914 period and the links between industrialisation and economic growth and welfare.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a great profile<\/a> from 2008 \u2014 written by the FT\u2019s then manufacturing editor Peter Marsh \u2014 when Mokyr was already one of the world\u2019s leading economic historians. He once insisted to the WSJ<\/a> that he was a \u201crank-and-file academic, not a basketball star\u201d, and said that he had \u201cneither a literary agent nor a speaker bureau\u201d. Alphaville suspects that might have changed today. <\/p>\n
The best way to check out his work is probably to buy his 2016 book A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy<\/a>, which was discussed by John Burn-Murdoch in a column<\/a> last year, and reviewed<\/a> in the FT by professor Diane Coyle. She wrote:<\/p>\n
\nMokyr\u2019s new book seeks to identify the conditions that turned the inventions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries into sustained, modern economic growth. There had been earlier significant waves of invention in China and the Islamic world, for example, but none snowballed into a world-changing industrial revolution. <\/p>\n
Mokyr argues that in western Europe at the time of the Enlightenment, a set of conditions happened to coincide to create a \u201cRepublic of Letters\u201d, a ferment of public debate and innovation we might now label as \u201copen science\u201d. Knowledge, from deep scientific insight to more practical technological know-how and tinkering, became a common resource. Leading scientists and thinkers corresponded with counterparts around the continent, and were helped by the political fragmentation of Europe, which led to rulers competing to attract the most prominent intellectual stars to their own territories.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
FT Alphaville\u2019s old podcast Alphachat (RIP) interviewed Mokyr back in 2019 as well, and you can listed to his chat with Brendan Greeley here<\/a>. <\/p>\n
The other half of the prize has gone to occasional collaborators Philippe Aghion of the College de France, INSEAD and the London School of Economics and Brown University\u2019s Peter Howitt, \u201cfor the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction\u201d, according to the Nobel selection committee for economics<\/a>. <\/p>\n
In 2021 FT\u2019s Martin Wolf explored Aghion\u2019s The Power of Creative Destruction<\/a> \u2014 co-written with C\u00e9line Antonin and Simon Bunel \u2014 and called it \u201clucid, empirically grounded, wide-ranging and well-argued<\/a>\u201d. Martin even selected it as one of his best beach side reads for 2021<\/a>, which for an economist is probably close to winning a Nobel.<\/p>\n
Aghion has also written a book titled Endogenous Growth Theory<\/a> with the third laureate, Howitt, who specialises in macroeconomics and monetary economics at Brown University. <\/p>\n
Brown\u2019s biography says that Howitt is one of the fathers of the modern \u201cSchumpeterian\u201d approach to the theory of economic growth, and that he \u201chas been active in the search for new foundations to macroeconomics and monetary theory, and has written extensively on the subject of Canadian monetary policy\u201d.<\/p>\n
Martin Guzman, a former economics minister of Argentina who now teaches at Columbia, congratulated his former PhD supervisor and called him a \u201cspectacular\u201d economist. <\/p>\n
\nFelicitaciones a mi director de tesis doctoral, PETER HOWITT, Premio N\u00f3bel de Econom\u00eda 2025!<\/p>\n
S\u00faper merecido. Peter es un economista espectacular, profundo, que ha hecho aportes de enorme valor a la econom\u00eda, tanto en crecimiento econ\u00f3mico como en econom\u00eda monetaria.<\/p>\n
Y como\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/00OJuSccOC<\/a><\/p>\n