Interview with the 2025 economic sciences laureate Philippe Aghion on 6 December 2025 during Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

How were you as a child? 

Philippe Aghion: I had very creative parents. My father wanted to do social revolution in Egypt, and was close to the surrealism movement. He was close to Tristan Tzara, who was the head of dadaism – the guy who created dadaism – and Aragon or Éluard. I remember spending my vacation as a little child in Tristan Tzara’s house. My mother created a fashion house called Chloé. She invented luxury, ready-to-wear. They were progressionists. She had a vision that the woman should not be there just to please her husband but should be there to be free. She should not have to change clothes four times a day. She should have the same clothes and be free and be herself. They were both from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the left Bank of Paris, so that all came from there. They were innovators in their own way. My father was a social innovator and my mother innovated in fashion. But they both had also social concerns, and I think I owe a lot to that. So my early childhood with them was quite exceptional. 

How did your upbringing shape the way you think? 

Philippe Aghion: I think it gives some freedom, it makes you disruptive. I think it’s very important what we try to do, it is to change paradigm. There was a paradigm and we said, we want another paradigm. I was surrounded by artists and fashion. Karl Lagerfeld, for example, was very important. He would do my German homework when I was a child. I was surrounded by people who wanted to change things. I said, maybe we could do the same with economics, to change paradigm. That’s something AI cannot do. For example, we talk a lot about AI. AI can do lots of things, but AI will not bring a new paradigm. So far, AI doesn’t change paradigms. 

Why did you choose to study economics? 

Philippe Aghion: I was a Communist party member in France, and I was very much concerned. It was the time of Eurocommunism. My model was the Italian Communist Party and Berlinguer. I was very much concerned with the social movement, but I wanted prosperity. I could see that politicians, all articulating seemingly logical reasonings, getting to opposite conclusions. So I started asking myself: one reasoning must be right, the other one must be wrong somewhere, and I can’t see it. I started to question myself in economics, and that got me into research in economics. Because I didn’t stop questioning myself from that very time, and that made me into economy. But my motivation was to say, I want to better understand the world, to transform the world. I want to build up a theory that would allow us to make the world a better place. That’s what we try to do with our growth theory. We have the Draghi report in Europe. It’s very much inspired by our theory. We had this World Development report on the middle-income trap, very much based on our theory. We wanted to build new glasses to look at the world, which is this new growth theory, to try and get populations out of poverty. Why do I believe in growth? Because growth is what takes you out of poverty. Why did poverty go dwindled in China or in India? It is because of growth. Growth took off in those countries. That’s why I believe so much in growth and prosperity. But I want a shared prosperity. 

Did you have a special teacher that influenced you? 

Philippe Aghion: I had a French teacher. It was funny, he was not an economist. He was a teacher in French and Latin when I was in ninth, tenth grade. And he had a style, an enthusiasm, a way of teaching, which I think I tried to emulate. He would captivate us. He had a big imprint on me. Then there were various people, economists, who influenced me. For example, I would say Jean Tirole, Oliver Hart, Eric Maskin, who were Nobel Prize winners, or Dick (Richard) Caves, Jean-Michel Grandmont. There were various, who pushed me and influenced me and taught me how to write a model. Of course, it was very important to meet with Peter Howitt, because we teamed up. Without my meeting with Peter, nothing would have happened. 

What role does play have in your work? 

Philippe Aghion: I love to play. I love to joke. I’m a big blunderer, by the way. I think that you need to have fun and joke and there is a big joke about me. When I just learned that I got the prize, I said I was speechless. But apparently there was a press conference right after, and they said they’ve never seen such a talkative, speechless person. I love to joke. I have a cousin, with whom I use to joke a lot. I always see the joke in things. I think it’s important because otherwise, you always have to make things serious. I mean, I take things very seriously at the same time, particularly the Nobel ceremony, a big deal, obviously. But I think it’s important that you don’t take yourself too seriously. Also humour helps you go through difficult situations as well. There is a huge draw, being humorous and seeing yourself with distance, because otherwise, if you take yourself too seriously, you may go through huge ups and downs. Humour is a regulator, I believe. 

What is your advice for students to reach their full potential? 

Philippe Aghion: I think they should have ambition. I think it’s very important to have ambition, because you can never go further than your ambitions. So you need to be ambitious. You need to go after big questions. I wanted to put industrial organisation into growth economics. I wanted to have a new growth model, that would put the firm, the enterprise from dynamics at the heart of the model. I knew from the start I wanted to do that. I learned industrial organisation because I wanted to put IO into growth. So I think you need to go for big ideas. You need to be persistent. You know that you will have desert crossing. You know that there will be headwinds, and you have to resist the headwinds and still believe in what you do. I think it’s very important that you hold on to the thing. 

When we started with Peter Howitt, I felt very early on that we had something. There were people who tried to imitate us. There were people who tried to say that what we’re doing was not important. There were many things that happened. And you have to hold on, because I knew this was the winning thing. I never thought I would get a Nobel Prize, but I said, well, if ever something can get us far, is this new growth model based on creative destruction and from dynamics. I think it’s important to have big go for big ideas. Be resilient. Be persistent. Believe and have curiosity, and let yourself be guided by curiosity. 

Was there a moment when you knew you were on to something groundbreaking? 

Philippe Aghion: Schumpeter was a curiosity. It was a kind of mundane thing. In the history of economic thought, people would mention Schumpeter en passant. But we knew from the work of Robert Solow, that capital accumulation alone cannot give you long run growth. At some moment, you run out of steam if you just rely on accumulation, because you have decreasing returns with capital accumulation. So you need something called technical progress. And here was this guy, Schumpeter, talking about creative disruption, but there was no model. There was no empiric. Peter was my neighbour. He was visiting MIT from Western Ontario. I was first assistant professor and I went into his office and said to Peter, “Why don’t we try to build a model that would encompass the idea.” And we started from scratch, and we wrote a model. At some moment we got this formula: Growth is the product of frequency and size of innovation. It looks very stupid. But we got a beautiful formula for the growth rates. I think at that time, I said, “Look, Peter, we might get a Nobel with this.” It was in 1987. It was half joke, of course. You see what I mean? But that very day, when we had this formula in front of us, I said, “Peter, I think we have something big.” And I knew I had to hold on to it forever. So for the past 38 years, I never stopped working on this. 

I was a Harvard student. I did my PhD at Harvard, prior to meeting with Peter, between ‘84 and ‘87. My dream at the time was to get into the Harvard Society of Fellows. It’s a kind of first class postdoc. For three years, you are paid like an assistant professor, but you don’t have to teach. You have dinner with Amartya Sen, with Robert Solow, with the renowned physics professors. It’s a luxury. That was my dream at the time. I took an oral exam with them. At dinner time Robert Solow was my neighbour, and he said, “You didn’t quite understand the question that was asked to you.” I understood at that moment that I had failed the test, and I would not get into the Harvard Society of Fellows. As a result, I ended up at MIT, which is a fantastic place. At MIT I met Peter Howitt, and we did our model. Imagine that I had succeeded the oral exam, that I had got to the Society of Fellows. I would not be here today. So how important it is to fail in life. In the US culture, they tell you to fail, fail and fail. Take risk and fail, because that’s how you make discoveries. And that failure, for example, saved my life. Good God, that I didn’t get into the Harvard Society of Fellows. I would have missed working with Peter on this new paradigm. 

Why do you work so well together with Peter Howitt? 

Philippe Aghion: First, because we love to joke. It’s always laughing. I love to work with joking. And there is a shared enthusiasm. I’m overly optimistic. Peter is not a pessimist, but sometimes he calms me down, you see? I’m a kind of exuberant, Peter is a bit more quiet. I would tend to say, “Let’s simplify the model.” It’s good to simplify. Peter would be more courageous, saying, even if the model is complicated, “Let’s keep working on the model.” So we were complementary in those ways as well. But I was also more micro-trained – the industrial organisation part – I was more into that. Peter was more of a macro economist. He had worked on monetary theory and search theory, so we had complementary skills. But we have also personalities that work very well. It always was very smooth and fun to work with Peter, really a treat. 

What are some challenges you have faced? 

Philippe Aghion: We had various challenges. For example, at some moment we had a colleague of ours. He’s a fantastic colleague, and he tried to claim that ideas were much harder to find and that without population growth, you could not get sustained growth. That was a challenge. We had to cope with that challenge. That was a serious one. There were times where people said, “Well, you’ve done your theory, but after all, is that so important?” It was very important to have for us to interact with empiricists. First we were doing theory, and then we realised we had a new paradigm that would make it possible to have a dialogue with empiricists working on micro data. 

So our collaboration with Richard Blundell, for example, with very good micro econometricians – I’m sure Richard Blundell will be a Nobel laureate – was very important. All our work on competition and growth was very much a dialogue between theory and empiric, but it was a new kind of empirics, on micro data, on firm level data. That was, I think, a big step forward. Now you have a whole set of young generation – you will see several of them –  who do this continuous dialogue between modelling and data, and micro data. That, I think, was a big step because before, people would write models, but they would not test them, or they would test the model on macro data, not on micro data. Our theory, it’s a theory all about the firm. The Schumpeterian growth theory is a theory where growth is driven by new entrants coming in all the time. Growing, hopefully, if they’re talented, by innovating, and then they become big. Of course, they’re tempted to use their rants to prevent newcomers, and that’s why you need government and civil society to make sure that yesterday’s innovators will not prevent new innovators. That’s why competition policy, for example, is so important. But it’s really this view where new talents are there. You need to have new talents coming in, that if they are good, they’ll have the opportunities to grow. But make sure that once they’ve grown, they don’t prevent the continuous inflow of new talents. You see, that’s the world we are after. So that’s really about entry firms, firm dynamics. 

I think it’s interesting because I will tell you something. I think this prize, it’s a prize of the young. I think it’s the young generation that push for it, everywhere. It took a new generation for this to happen as well. That’s why I believe a lot also in my students. We have our growth lab in Paris. The young people, you will see them. They will be there at the lecture, because they’re the future. It’s my way of looking at the world. I believe that I want to push young people to be better than I am, because I believe that’s what drives the growth process. It’s to have continuously younger people who are better than you and will do your creative destruction. But that’s what makes the world keep going. The view is there, in all respects. 

What are the greatest possibilities and risks posed by AI? 

Philippe Aghion: I had the chance to co-chair an AI commission in France. We handed over a report to President Macron, and then there was the AI summit in Paris, where Macron was very much inspired by this report. AI, I believe, has huge growth potential, because it automates ideas. It automates tasks not only in the production of good and services, but also in the production of ideas. It makes ideas easier to find. Very often new ideas are a recombination of old ideas, but with AI, you can recombine much more and you can select much more quickly among those potential ideas that you want to test. That’s what I believe AI has enormous growth potential. The problem is the institutions. If we don’t have, for example, appropriate competition policy, the result may be that some superstar firms, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, may end up dominating everything and inhibiting any new entrance. And remember, growth is about new people coming in. The danger with AI is that you put a bad user with the wrong competition policy, it’ll just help those firms become more than ever overwhelming and preventing new talents to come in. So I think it has huge growth potential, but you need appropriate institutions and in particular, appropriate competition policy. So open source regulations, but not too many, because incumbent firms know how to deal with regulations and entrants don’t. Digital market act, to share data extended to the cloud, which is dominated by just a few. We need a good competition point. 

On unemployment, it will destroy jobs, but it’ll create a lot of new jobs. Why? Because it creates many new ideas. Also firms that adopt AI become more productive, though that’s more competitive. So the world’s demand for their goods is much bigger. Like any other previous revolutions, it will destroy jobs and create jobs. We need a good system. My model is the Danish flexicurity. I know in Sweden, you have something close to it. But my model there is the Danish flexicurity. When you lose your job in Denmark for two years, you get 90% of your salary. The state retrains you and helps you find a new job. I think we should emulate. I think you are much closer to Denmark than we are in France, but I would really much push. We need good education, because at school you learn to learn. You need school with manuals, with grades, dictations, calculus, where you learn by yourself. On top of the good education system, you need a good flexicurity system. If we have good competition policy, good education, and good flexicurity, we can harness the power of AI. If we don’t have those, then we can expect the worst from AI. AI is like a crazy horse. It’s like a powerful horse, but if you don’t guide the horse, you get to the wall. But if you guide the horse, you can go anywhere you want. That’s the way I see AI. 

What are your passions? 

Philippe Aghion: I love movies. I was discussing with the head of the Foundation – she’s a big specialist – we discussed Ingmar Bergman. For me, Bergman is the greatest of the greatest. I’ve seen The Seventh Seal zillions of times. Fanny and Alexander, Persona – I am a big fan of Ingmar Bergman. I think everybody else is a dwarf compared to Bergman. So I’m passionate about movies. I love to read as well. Reading and movies are my passions.  

Watch the interview

Did you find any typos in this text? We would appreciate your assistance in identifying any errors and to let us know. Thank you for taking the time to report the errors by sending us an e-mail.