American-Israeli Joel Mokyr shares Nobel economics prize by asking 'why?'

Award goes to three researchers for explaining innovation-driven economic growth

The Nobel economics prize has been awarded to academics 'who have taught us that sustained growth cannot be taken for granted', said the committee. Reuters

The Nobel prize in economics was awarded on Monday to American-Israeli Joel Mokyr, France's Philippe Aghion and Canada's Peter Howitt for work on technology's impact on sustained economic growth.

Mr Mokyr is from Northwestern University, Mr Aghion from the College de France and the London School of Economics, and Mr Howitt from Brown University.

The Nobel committee said Mokyr “demonstrated that if innovations are to succeed one another in a self-generating process, we not only need to know that something works, but we also need to have scientific explanations for why”.

Mr Mokyr won one half of the prize “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”, while Aghion and Howitt shared the other half “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences jury said.

Joel Mokyr, the 2025 co-winner of the Nobel prize for Economics. Mokyr shares the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics. Northwestern University

The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the final prize to be given out this year and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million).

“The laureates have taught us that sustained growth cannot be taken for granted. Economic stagnation, not growth, has been the norm for most of human history. Their work shows that we must be aware of, and counteract, threats to continued growth,” the prize-awarding body said.

Kerstin Enflo, a member of the economics prize committee, said: "During the last 200 years, the world has seen more economic growth than ever before in human history."

"The laureates' work reminds us that we should not take progress for granted. Instead, society must keep an eye on the factors that generate and sustain economic growth," Enflo said.

The awards for medicine, physics, chemistry, peace and literature were announced last week. The peace prize was awarded to Venezuelan campaigner Maria Corina Machado, despite a campaign for it to be given to Donald Trump. Omar Yaghi, a scientist who was born to a Palestinian refugee family in Jordan, was a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Those prizes were established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been handed out since 1901, with a few interruptions, mostly due to the world wars.

The economics prize was established much later, being given out first in 1969 when it was won by Norway's Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen from the Netherlands for work in dynamic economic modelling. Tinbergen's brother Nikolaas also won a prize, taking home the prize for medicine in 1973.

While few economists are household names, relatively well-known winners include former US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman.

Last year's economics award went to US-based academics Simon Johnson, James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu for research that explored the relationship between colonisation and the establishment of public institutions to explain why some countries have been mired in poverty for decades.