The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to three economists who, with different but surprisingly complementary approaches, have changed our way of thinking about economic growth. Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt are not only rigorous scholars: they are also narrators of the long history of progress, interpreters of the profound relationship between innovation and society. In an era in which growth seems not only to slow down, but also to lose its social legitimacy, their work suggests that prosperity is not a gift of destiny, but rather the result of a fragile intertwining of knowledge, institutions, and destructive creativity. The Nobel Committee has identified an urgent need: to ask ourselves no longer just how much we grow, but how and why. And above all, what makes it possible for progress not to stop. This year’s choice has the flavor of a return to the great questions that permeate modernity. Questions that concern not only economists, but every citizen grappling with the promises (and risks) of a world that is changing too quickly. hurry.


Joel Mokyr

Mokyr and the Culture of Knowledge
Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, has devoted much of his career to a fundamental question: why, in human history, has sustained economic growth emerged only recently and in very specific contexts? Why has humanity, for millennia, lived with almost stagnant productivity, only to experience a sudden acceleration starting in the modern age?
Mokyr’s answer is not found in numbers, but in culture.His thesis is that modern technological progress was made possible by a cognitive revolution: the emergence of a culture that values theoretical knowledge, the diffusion of scientific inquiry, the belief in the possibility of improving the world through reason. Occasional invention is not enough: we need a context in which knowledge is accumulated, transmitted, and combined. Mokyr calls this knowledge propositional knowledge, that is, abstract, generalizable knowledge, founded on explicit principles—the kind of knowledge that allows technologies to be replicated, improved, and shared. His historical reflection is not an erudite exercise: it is a contemporary warning. If growth has been the exception and not the rule in human history, then we cannot take it for granted. It can end, like any fragile phenomenon. And if the engine is the culture of knowledge, then its maintenance requires open institutions, widespread education, tolerance for experimentation, and, above all, a profound respect for human intelligence. In a world increasingly subject to anti-scientific impulses, Mokyr’s lesson rings more resonant than ever. current.

Aghion, Howitt and the destruction that creates
In parallel, the work of Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt has given theoretical form to one of the most powerful (and controversial) ideas of modern economic theory: that of "creative destruction". The intuition, borrowed from Schumpeter, is well known: innovation is not a peaceful and incremental process, but a perpetual movement in which each new invention replaces what existed before, creating winners and losers, momentum and fractures.
What Aghion and Howitt have done, however, goes well beyond the Schumpeterian suggestion. Their 1992 model, and subsequent developments, have built a formal theory of endogenous growth based on this continuous cycle of innovation and obsolescence.In this model, companies innovate to gain a temporary advantage, but their success generates imitations, new challenges, and new innovations. Growth does not come from outside, it is not an exogenous factor as in classical models: it arises within the economic system, from a structural mechanism of competition, research, and change. This vision has had a profound impact on public policy, redefining the role of the state no longer as a simple guarantor of stability, but as an active player in promoting research, training, and competition. Yet, it also brings with it social questions. Creative destruction, however fruitful, is also painful. Who loses their jobs due to automation? Who is unable to adapt to the new technological paradigm? To what extent is society willing to tolerate change if it is perceived as unfair?
Aghion and Howitt do not deny these risks, but suggest that they are not an argument against progress. On the contrary, they call for intelligent management of change: redistributive policies, lifelong learning, temporary protections. Growth does not happen by itself, but is governed. And the challenge, today, is more political than ever.

An award for the innovation ecosystem
If one looks for a common thread among the three graduates of 2025, it is precisely the idea that growth is the fruit of an ecosystem. Not an automatism, not magic. But a mix of theoretical knowledge (Mokyr), competition and renewal (Aghion and Howitt), and institutions capable of supporting both. In this vision, progress is not a straight line, but a spiral in which creation passes through destruction, and accumulation passes through the transmission of knowledge. knowledge.
It is an important message at a time when many Western countries are experiencing the feeling of declineThe slowdown in productivity, growing inequality, the sense of social disorientation in the face of new technologies are all signs that something in the engine of growth has jammed. But the 2025 prize reminds us that sustained growth is not impossible: it is just difficult, and above all conditioned. It is not enough to "let the markets do their thing". We need to invest in human capital, open institutions to innovation, ensure that rents do not stifle competition. In short, we need a growth policy.
The recognition given to Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt is therefore also a call to collective responsibility. No model can generate prosperity in the absence of an adequate institutional and cultural context. Economic theory alone is not enough: it must be incorporated into practices, laws, shared visions.

The dialogue with the Nobel Prize 2024
The Nobel Prize This year it is ideally linked to the one awarded in 2024 to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James ARobinson, awarded for their work on economic and political institutions as determinants of development. There we talked about the rules of the game, power, equity. Here we talk about innovation, knowledge, competition. But the two dimensions are not exclusive: they recall each other, they support each other.
If the institutions of Acemoglu and Robinson are the foundations of the house, the dynamism of Aghion and Mokyr is what allows the house to grow, to adapt, not to collapse under the weight of inertia. It is as if the Nobel committee were composing a great fresco on human development, uniting the supporting columns (the institutions) with the energy that flows through them (innovation).And it does so at a time in history when the two things risk separating, with technologies out of control and governments incapable of managing them.
This dialogue between successive prizes is, perhaps, the most valuable lesson for those who deal with public policies today. Growth is not just a question of efficiency, but of vision. And any vision that does not bring together equity, knowledge and freedom risks proving ephemeral.

A reflection on present and future
The 2025 Nobel Prize is a recognition of the past and a warning for the future. Mokyr reminds us that growth is born from the culture of curiosity and experimentation. Aghion and Howitt show that this growth only exists if we are willing to accept change and govern its consequences. Together, they offer a complete, articulated, almost humanistic theory of economic progress.
But what emerges behind the scenes is a paradox: progress, today, is no longer a shared hope. It is a source of restlessness, sometimes fear. The prize forces us to reformulate the narrative of growth: not as a blind race towards the new, but as a social project that unites science, democracy, and justice. In this sense, the lesson of these scholars is also an ethical lesson. The future is not written in the data. It is written in the institutions we choose, in the technologies we develop, in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we want to become. In this narrative, Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt are not just economists: they are architects of possibilities.