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Former Harvard Economics professor Philippe M. Aghion won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on economic growth and innovation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Oct. 13.
Aghion won the prize for his research on “creative destruction,” an economic concept where new innovations render old innovations obsolete and replace them.
He shared half of the Nobel Prize with Peter W. Howitt, a Brown University economist and Aghion’s co-author on a prominent 1992 paper that provided the first mathematical basis for creative destruction.
The concept was first popularized by Joseph A. Schumpeter, a Harvard economist and former Austrian finance minister who died in 1950. In a Monday interview, Aghion said that his research was meant to “build up a new growth model that would embody Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction.”
The other half of the Nobel Prize was awarded to Joel Mokyr, an economist from Northwestern University who “identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress,” according to a press release announcing the award.
The prize comes with a lump sum of 11 million Swedish kroner, or around $1.1 million, which will be split between the three laureates. Mokyr will get half, while Aghion and Howitt will each receive a quarter of the money.
In an interview with the Associated Press just hours after he won the Nobel Prize, Aghion described the award as “a total surprise.”
“It looked like everything was becoming blurred, totally unreal for me because I never thought for a second that I would get it this year,” he said.
Several of Aghion’s former colleagues at Harvard praised the Academy’s decision to award him the prize in economics.
Harvard Economics professor Oliver S.D. Hart, who received the Nobel Prize in 2016, wrote in an email that he was “absolutely delighted” with Aghion’s win.
“Philippe has enormous energy and enthusiasm and has been hugely productive,” Hart wrote. “I have no doubt that he will continue to do important and influential work for years to come.”
Harvard Economics professor David I. Laibson ’88 said in a Monday interview that, when Aghion was still a professor at Harvard, “every interaction was an exciting intellectual journey with Philippe.”
“He is full of ideas,” Laibson added. “He is full of energy. His enthusiasm for economics is overflowing.”
Laibson also said that Aghion’s 1992 paper, which the Academy specifically cited when announcing his prize, was so influential “that it was being taught in the leading courses of the field years before it actually reached the stage of publication.”
Aghion’s paper found that economies grow through consistent innovation driven by old technologies becoming obsolete. He wrote that for creative destruction to succeed, it must involve “both positive externality on your successors” as well as “negative externality on those that you drive out.”
After graduating from the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and obtaining a doctorate in economics from Harvard, Aghion briefly taught at MIT, where he met Howitt. He left in 1990 for a stint as deputy chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, before eventually returning to academia full-time as a professor at University College London.
Aghion returned to Cambridge in 2000 as an economics professor at Harvard, and left for an appointment at the London School of Economics in 2015.
Even after decades in the academy and dozens of publications, Aghion said his main motivation as an economist remains his simple passion for the field.
“You don’t do research for the Nobel Prize,” he said. “You do research because you follow your curiosity, because you push an agenda, because you push a line of research.”
