Canadian economist Peter Howitt is among the many group of three researchers who won this 12 months’s Nobel Memorial Prize in economics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday that Howitt, together with Dutch-born Joel Mokyr and French Philippe Aghion, received the prize for “having explained innovation-driven economic growth.”
Reached early Monday, Howitt said he was thrilled.
“It’s just the dream of a lifetime come true,” he said.
Howitt said he discovered concerning the prize from a persistent Swedish reporter who called his wife’s phone early within the morning, even before the committee could reach the economist.
By the point Howitt received his official notice from the committee, he already knew.
Howitt said his day was beginning to look very different after the decision.
“I’m going to be spending the day answering phone calls,” he said.
“We didn’t have any champagne within the fridge in anticipation of this,” he added.
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Howitt and Aghion relied on mathematics to clarify how creative destruction works, a key concept in economics that refers back to the process during which helpful recent innovations replace — and thus destroy — older technologies and businesses. The concept is generally related to economist Joseph Schumpeter, who outlined it in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.”
Howitt said he was looking forward to celebrating the win together with his co-author Aghion. The duo worked together for about 30 years, he said.
“I’m really looking forward to getting along with him, to celebrating with our family,” he said. “We now have children throughout North America, and we look ahead to going to Sweden together.”
Aghion said he was shocked by the honour.
“I can’t find the words to specific what I feel,” he said by phone to the press conference in Stockholm. He said he would invest his prize money in his research laboratory.
Asked about current trade wars and protectionism on this planet, Aghion said that: “I’m not welcoming the protectionist way within the U.S. That is just not good for … world growth and innovation.”
Each economists studied the mechanisms behind sustained growth, including in a 1992 article during which they constructed a mathematical model for creative destruction.
Howitt, 79, received his bachelor’s degree in economics from Montreal’s McGill University and his master’s degree from the Western University in London, Ont. He’s a professor of social sciences at Brown University in Rhode Island.
“The laureates’ work shows that economic growth can’t be taken as a right. We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, in order that we don’t fall back into stagnation,” said John Hassler, chair of the committee for the prize in economic sciences.
Half of the 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million) prize goes to Mokyr and the opposite half is shared by Aghion and Howitt. Winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a diploma.
The economics prize is formally often called the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the Nineteenth-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.
Since then, it has been awarded 57 times to a complete of 99 laureates. Only three of the winners have been women.
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