First reactions. Telephone interview, October 2025

“I’m not one of these people who keeps the phone on, and the champagne in the fridge”

Peter Howitt certainly didn’t seem to be expecting the news of his 2025 prize in economic sciences. In this call recorded just after the announcement, he talks to the Nobel Prize’s Adam Smith about his longstanding friendship with fellow laureate Philippe Aghion and how they started their collaboration in the conducive environment of MIT. “My future,” he concludes, “is going to involve more economics, and less golf, than I had anticipated!”

Interview transcript

Peter Howitt: Hello?  

Adam Smith: Hello, am I speaking with Peter Howitt? 

PH: Speaking, yes.  

AS: This is Adam Smith calling from the website of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm.  

PH: I’m in. Thank you for your call. 

AS: Many congratulations. We have this tradition of recording very short interviews with new laureates. Do you mind speaking for just a couple of minutes?  

PH: I don’t, I may not be very coherent because my mind is racing right now. 

AS: Must indeed be. Where do we catch you?  

PH: Sleeping. I’m in North Carolina.  

AS: And is that home?  

PH: That is now home for me. I have retired from teaching and this is where I live. 

AS: So the call from Stockholm woke you?  

PH: I have only talked to journalists until now. 

AS: So, they broke the news to you, right. Did you have any moments of doubt or did the journalists manage to convince you pretty quickly?  

PH: Well, you know, I knew this was a possibility. I thought a fairly remote possibility, but, I’m not one of these people that keeps the phone on and the champagne in the fridge. I’m not sure we have any champagne at home. 

AS: I was just going to ask whether your wife and you have had even a moment to just sit together and celebrate this news?  

PH: No, not yet. I’m about to call my children too. I’m not sure that they know either.  

AS: That will be a lovely call to make. It’s very nice that you’ve been awarded together with Philippe Aghion. I mean, you two have been working together for what, 35 years? What is it that makes you such a compatible pair of collaborators?  

PH: Oh, that’s a good question. We complement each other very much. Philippe, when I met him was just a beginning assistant professor. I’m a little older than he is. I was on a sabbatical leave at MIT where he had taken his first job after graduating with his PhD from Harvard. He was a brilliant micro-economist, and I’m primarily a macro-economist, but he was interested in economic growth and I had some ideas too about economic growth and we got together and he had always been interested in this idea of creative destruction. I had ideas of how we could model it. We just, we seemed to click very well.  

AS: How lucky and clever to find each other and have such a partnership.  

PH: I think part of it was because of the atmosphere at MIT at the time. It was really conducive to collaborative work.  

AS: We can talk about this more when, I hope that we’ll have a longer conversation in the future.  

PH: I hope so. My future is going involve, I think, less golf and more economics than I had anticipated. 

AS: Does that idea fill you with pleasure?  

PH: It certainly does. It certainly does.  

AS: Good. I should leave you to call your children, but thank you very much indeed for speaking to us. 

PH: Thank you for calling. All right. 

AS: Thank you. Bye-bye. Congratulations. 

PH: Bye. 

AS: Thank you. 

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