The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics

Foundation for Economic Education ^ | Tuesday, October 14, 2025 | Sergio Martínez

[E. Pluribus Unum]

This year rewards theorists of creative destruction.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics honors three economists whose work embodies an idea first coined by Joseph Schumpeter: creative destruction. Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt have each advanced our understanding of how technological progress drives human prosperity. As Schumpeter described, every technological advance has two faces. It destroys by rendering old methods obsolete, yet it creates by flooding the market with new goods and more efficient ways of meeting human needs.

The Nobel Committee’s focus on creative destruction feels particularly relevant today, in an era dominated by fears over artificial intelligence. Public debate often centers on the destructive side of AI: the jobs it may displace or the industries it could transform beyond recognition. Far less attention is paid to its creative side: the new goods and services that will emerge, the efficiencies that will make certain tasks economically viable for the first time, and the opportunities that arise when resources are freed from older, less productive uses.

Among this year’s laureates, economic historian Joel Mokyr stands out. A professor at Northwestern University, his work shares affinities with that of Deirdre McCloskey. While McCloskey emphasizes the importance of bourgeois dignity—the revaluation of entrepreneurship—as a central factor in the Industrial Revolution, Mokyr has highlighted the power of ideas. As he writes in The Enlightened Economy, “Economic change depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.” Beliefs and discourse, together with material change, form the missing pieces of the modern growth puzzle.

For Mokyr, the innovator is a kind of rebel: someone unwilling to accept the world as it is, determined instead to reshape it. Prosperous economies rely on innovation as their fuel, yet innovation itself depends on...

[Red Badger]

Dang! Missed it again!..................

[SunkenCiv]

The rest of the Julian Simon keyword, sorted:

• The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation [04/02/2018]
• The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon and Our Gamble over Earth's Future [01/13/2017]
• You Worry. You Shouldn't : Overpopulation and Resource Exhaustion [06/18/2012]
• Population bomb still a fizzer 40 years on [11/09/2010]
• The `Population Bomb` Has Fizzled [09/01/2010]
• The New Scientist? (30 years after losing the bet to Julian Simon, Paul Ehrlich is at it again) [10/04/2009]
• Czar 54, Who Are You? [07/20/2009]
• MSM Shuns Embarrassing 'The Population Bomb' Anniversary [06/29/2008]
• Population Implosion [12/08/2007]
• In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence [08/08/2007]
• Wager between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich [12/24/2005]
• Fill 'er Up with Oils Sands! [10/31/2005]
• IDEOLOGICAL IDIOCIES, book review: Intellectual Morons: Smart People Fall For Stupid Ideas [11/01/2004]
• Tampa Bay tapped as new source of drinking water [06/10/2003]
• America: A Free Economy, a Prosperous Nation [07/05/2002]
• The world has more oil not less [12/24/2001]

[SunkenCiv]

The Birth of Plenty:
How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created
By William J. Bernstein (2004)

[VanShuyten]

What? No socialists? Must have had too much akvavit on voting day.

[gildafarrell]

And we care why?

[x]

I guess they ran out of economists whose names were familiar "household words."

A professor at Northwestern University, his work shares affinities with that of Deirdre McCloskey.

Deirdre McCloskey, formerly Donald McCloskey, is sort of well known.

[aquila48]

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