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

How were you as a child? 

Peter Howitt: I was a very happy child, I’m told, for most of my upbringing in a small city in Ontario, Canada. When I became a teenager and went to high school, I was not so well-behaved. I was not a good student in high school. I was fortunately at a very good high school. One of the physics laureates of 2018 got in touch with me after my prize was announced to tell me that she went to the same high school as I did in Guelph, Ontario. So it was a very good high school, but I was not a good student. But I had the good fortune of getting a part-time job working, during my last couple of years in high school, for a wool broker, a man who had a small company with two other employees who imported wool from all over the world and sold it to textile mills in Ontario and Quebec. 

He took me on doing odd jobs in his office, cleaning up the wool samples, and helping him to to deal with some of the correspondence in a very minor way. I don’t think I did much help for him, but he did a lot of help for me. This bit of work inspired me. I remember watching his teletype machine rolling away with this tape coming across with prices of different kinds of wool from all around the world. The prices would go up and down. I remember asking him, why are these prices gyrating like this? He started telling me about supply and demand. I thought, well, this sounds all very mysterious. And he’s the one who said, if you want to learn more about this, you should go study economics when you finish high school. 

So I did, and I went off to McGill University to take a degree in economics and political science. I really fell in love with economics as an undergraduate. And I got interested in other aspects. I got more interested in macroeconomics and how the whole system fits together in ways that we don’t really realise in our normal way, that we’re almost like ants in an anthill. An anthill is a very complex social organisation, and each of the ants is playing its own role, but probably quite unaware of the grand picture. And of course, we’re a lot smarter than ants, but we also have a correspondingly more complex organisation. This whole idea of how we’re in this world that’s controlled by forces that we don’t really think of in from day to day, but we could perhaps understand if we stand back and take a look at it, really caught my imagination. 

I went on when I graduated, I was offered a job working for one of the textile companies that had been a customer of my part-time boss when I was in high school, a very attractive offer to start working in business. I had to make a decision, should I do that? Or should I go on and study more economics and perhaps become an economist? I remember it was, it was a difficult decision, but I decided that what I really loved was studying economics. So I went on to do that, and I’ve never regretted that decision. The company that had offered me this job was one of the largest in Canada at the time, that it doesn’t even exist anymore. Because the whole textile business in North America has moved elsewhere. So I’ve been very happy with the decisions that I made. Even as a troubled child, I managed to make good decisions but largely with the help of others. This person who offered me this job I don’t think had any idea of how much his little, it was basically an act of kindness because I wasn’t that much help to him. He took me under his wing and acted as a mentor, and it has made all the difference in my life. 

How can we encourage children to pursue a career in science?  

Peter Howitt: I think it helps to tell people that if something is really interesting to them, they shouldn’t be afraid to pursue that, even if it seems that there’s not much payoff to them, that pursuing your curiosity can really pay off. I think another lesson is that I never really had a lot of purpose to my life until I actually started working. And as I say, it wasn’t much of a job. It was just a part-time job, but it was getting involved in an organisation that was doing important things in their own little way. It was in that context that I first became inspired. I think that that a lot of the meaning in life comes not from the money you make from working, but just from the experience and from the fulfillment and the the challenge that you find when working.  

What qualities make a successful researcher? 

Peter Howitt: Curiosity is number one. And the ability to pursue through failure, because most of what I ever tried didn’t work out. So you just have to keep trying. There’s an old saying that if at first you don’t succeed you should redefine the question. Start looking somewhere else. Keep on searching around until you find something that really works. Persistence is important. 

What advice do you give to students? 

Peter Howitt: I tell them to work hard and to be constantly on the lookout for new ideas. Never think that you’ve got the complete answer to anything. Most of the students that I’ve had in my career have been real self-starters, and they haven’t really needed a lot of advice. I’ve learned as much from them as they have from me. 

Tell us about your co-laureate Philippe Aghion?  

Peter Howitt: Philippe is a very dynamic and creative energetic person. Even now, I think he has more energy than I ever had. When we first met up, it was a great combination. First of all, he was a micro economist. I was a macro economist, and we were both interested in similar things. We really clicked well together. Philippe, and I think he’ll tell you the same thing, tends to be a little more impatient than, than I am. And when we would be working things out at the blackboard, if it wasn’t working, he would suggest, well, let’s throw that away and try something different. I would always be the one that would say, well, just a minute now… Let’s pursue this a little further. Sometimes, he was right, we should have moved on. Sometimes, we’d discover things that I don’t think he would’ve discovered on his own, because he would’ve moved on. We had very complimentary skills and personalities. He’s a very generous and warmhearted person, and someone with a great sense of humour. It was tremendous fun working with him. 

What is a favourite memory from working together? 

Peter Howitt: I have many memories. I remember when we wrote our very first paper together, which still remains our most important paper. It’s really the foundation on which everything else that we did together was built. I remember we were coming up with a lot of different ideas, and I remember suggesting to him, well, maybe we should make it a series of papers. We’ll write one paper about growth, another one about cycles, another one about some other aspect. I remember him saying, no, no, no, Peter. We put it all together. We build a bomb. I remember just thinking, well, that’s a good way to do it. We packed a lot into that first paper, and it was a tremendous success. I just remember that, ‘we’re going to build a bomb.’ And we did. 

When did you realise you were onto something groundbreaking? 

Peter Howitt: I think we realised very quickly that it was something groundbreaking. We were in a situation where the theory of economic growth was clearly underdeveloped and needed something new into it. This idea of creative destruction had been around for decades, but it hadn’t yet been incorporated into the theories of economic growth that economists really used or taught to students. So we knew it was an important thing to put this in. And it wasn’t very long after we wrote the paper and started presenting it in seminars at different universities and research institutes that we started to get a lot of positive feedback, and we realised we were onto something big. It just led to a lot of further research. 

We had a very intense period for the next 15 years or so and we continued to collaborate for long after that. But the first 15 years or so were really intense periods, even though we were for almost all of that period on opposite sides of the Atlantic. We were constantly in touch. We would constantly go visit each other, stay with each other’s families. We were really part of each other’s families. It was a very intense period and we knew we were onto something big. Especially after we produced our first book, which I just donated to the museum as a little artifact representing our work together, it was just a period in my life that was unlike any other where I had already celebrated my 40th birthday before coming to MIT where Philippe and I met. I was beginning to think that I had at one time thought that when I turn 30, I’ll be over the hill and finished and do nothing more. When I got to be 30, I didn’t think that way anymore. But when I got to be 40, I thought, well, now I can sort of take it easy. I don’t have to work so hard. I probably won’t do anything really important after that. I didn’t realise that the best was yet to come. It’s largely because I met Philippe and because I met him in the sort of atmosphere that they had at MIT, very collegial atmosphere, they had other brilliant people there that we learned a lot from. It was just a great coincidence that we were both there. 

Philippe will probably tell you about how he was disappointed to have come to MIT as his first job. He had hoped to join the Society of Fellows at Harvard, but had been turned down. And I had come to MIT not to work on growth theory. It was the furthest thing from my mind when I came there. I had come there as a visiting professor hoping to do some work on unemployment theory and some things that were really not all that closely related, but we connected, we started talking. This idea of ‘how could we bring creative destruction into growth theory’ came up and we started talking, and it just happened. But it could easily not have happened. 

How have you faced challenges in your career? 

Peter Howitt: There were always periods of doubt, because when we would decide, alright, let’s study how growth affects problems of unemployment, or let’s see how it’s affected by public health or by national debt, or something like that – it’s like in any research project, at first, you try things and they’re not working out. You try something else, and they’re not working out. Doing that sort of research is very much a trial-and-error procedure. I don’t remember any particular time when I got more discouraged than others, but I do remember that whenever we started a project, there was a long period that was rather discouraging and we would have to sort of encourage each other to pursue. But we did. I was the one who was very patient at exploring every possibility before we threw it away. Philippe was always the one anxious to try something new. Between us, we got through those periods very well together with a lot of humour. It really helps to be collaborating with someone that you really enjoy being with. 

How do you cope with failure? 

Peter Howitt: What we are trying to, as anybody who’s engaged in any kind of scientific work is trying to innovate, they’re trying to come up with something that nobody’s come up with before. If it was obvious what it took to do, it wouldn’t be so important. If it’s not obvious, then that means that you’re not going to find the right way the first time you try it. You just have to persist. I think failure is an important part of the process of creation. In a way, we should think of failure as being just as productive as success because you need a whole foundation of ideas that you’ve tried and failed with before you can come up with something that actually works. So we should think of failure as being a very productive process. 

What possibilities and risks do you see in AI? 

Peter Howitt: I think AI has the possibility to make us all much more productive. I’ve already noticed myself that when I have a question that I’d like to see a bit of a survey of the literature, the first thing I tend to do now is to go to Chat GPT or Gemini and ask them for a little bit of a survey, just as a sort of a first stab at things. It really lays out the groundwork for me, and often in a very sophisticated and complex way. I could imagine all sorts of jobs in which that will be the case. But in some cases, they’ll do the job so well that they could actually replace people. I think that there is a challenge to society of making sure that we still have lots of meaningful and rewarding jobs for people doing work that is in the future, going to be done by artificial intelligence. 

I could imagine that there are a lot of jobs in which the very best people will be made so productive in whatever it is, organising people’s accounts or writing speeches or whatever it is. They will be so much more productive having this artificial intelligence as a tool that they’re going to be able to do most of the work that the whole industry requires in a country. They’ll be superstars being tremendously productive. But then the question is, what are the rest of them going to do? I’m confident history has shown that in the long run there are going to be lots more jobs for people. It’s just that the working out of a general purpose technology like this, and we’ve had a few of them in the past, it takes a long time and it takes a lot of downstream innovations before these new jobs that are going to open up are actually created. 

I thought about this a while ago, thinking, what would people have said in 1875 in North America? I imagine it would be the same in, mostly Europe when half the population was engaged in agriculture and it took half the people in the population just to produce enough food for the other half. What would you, what would they have said if you’d told them that, we’re only going to need one or two per cent of the population to produce food. They surely would’ve asked, what are the rest of them going to do? You couldn’t tell them,  they’ll be so much more productive because they’ll have phones and computers and TV and so on that they wouldn’t have heard of any of that. 

The patent on the telephone wasn’t until 1876. Certainly none of the rest of the things had been invented, but these things did come along. What’s unique about this particular general purpose technology is that it’s progressing so rapidly that it’s not as if we’re going to have to create these jobs over the next 150 years. We’re going to have to do it over maybe the next 10 or 15 years to employ all of the people that are going to be rendered redundant by this possibly. I mean, it seems to me now, I’m not an expert on the technology. I’ve only experienced it from my own personal point of view, but it does seem to have that potential. I think that this is a national challenge that most governments ought to be taking a look at, because like with any other act of creative destruction, if the people who are going to be the losers from this new technology can’t be somehow brought on board and compensated or made part of the benefits, they’re going to find ways to stop it. We’re not going to be able to enjoy the positive benefits that we could get from it. 

What are your hobbies and interests? 

Peter Howitt: I have retired from teaching, and I’m largely retired from doing research. But winning this prize has rather brought me back into the world of research. My wife and I live in the hills of Western North Carolina, United States far from any leading research university. We enjoy nature. We enjoy walking in the hills and we particularly enjoy playing golf. Especially in the hills, it gives us lots of exercise, fresh air, companionship and it’s a wonderful new chapter of our lives. 

Watch the interview

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