Brown's Peter Howitt Wins Economics Nobel Prize
- Bill McNeely
- Oct 13
- 2 min read
Brown Economics Professor (Emeritus) Peter Howitt shares this year's Nobel memorial prize in Economic Sciences with Phillipe Aghion of INSEAD (Paris) and the London School of Economics, and Joel Mokyr of Northwestern. Mokyr received a 50% share, with Howitt and Aghion each getting 25%.
Howitt and the others were cited for work on how the world economy has been able to sustain a growth mode - with some slips - for about 2 centuries now. For the previous 10,000 years of human existence, that was not normal.
As is typical of Nobel awards, Howitt's award centered on a 33-year-old research effort with Aghion about "creative destruction." When innovation brings new technology to a market, old technology and its champions are displaced and usually suffer. Think about televisions 60 years ago, when no one had heard of flat-panel units from LG, Samsung, etc., and the big players - with CRT technology - included RCA, GE, Motorola, and Westinghouse. Powerful entrenched interests can block progress - the canal boat shippers fought the rise of railroads in the 1840's and 1850's in the U.S.
Howitt was surprised - most Nobel winners are. He said his phone was not turned on, but someone from Sweden called his wife, who told him he should answer his phone!
Howitt was born in Canada and studied at McGill and Western Ontario before earning a doctorate at Northwestern. He moved to Brown in 2000 after working at Ohio State.
Howitt joins Michael Kosterlitz, a Brown physics professor who won a 2016 Nobel, as laureates at Brown. The late Leon Cooper also won a Nobel - back when I was a student!
Craig Mello '82 was also a Brown-grad laureate, awarded the Nobel 2006 for his role in discovering RNA interference. In a BAM interview, he modestly characterized his breakthrough as "not so much a discovery as a discussion", an acknowledgement that it takes a village to create science breakthroughs.