Joel Mokyr’s speech at the Nobel Prize banquet, 10 December 2025

Your Majesties,
Your Royal Highnesses,
Excellences,
Dear laureates,
Ladies and gentlemen!

On behalf of my co-winners and friends, Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France and Peter Howitt of Brown University, I would like to thank the Nobel Foundation, the  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien) and the Central Bank of Sweden for this great honor and this magnificent event.

Instead of talking about the roads the three of us followed to get where we are standing now, I should like to mention briefly another great economist who died in 1950, long before the establishment of the Nobel Prize in Economics, or he would surely have made the voyage to Stockholm himself. The Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, to whom all three of us are indebted, was one of the first to propose the idea of what he called “creative destruction” – the process in which useful knowledge, the understanding of nature’s laws, allows entrepreneurs to create economic progress and help us enrich the world by bringing in the new and disposing of the old.  

Will that process continue? We believe it will. Humans are by nature inquisitive, and have continued to uncover the secrets of nature, as the nine winners in various sciences present here so gloriously personify. Given how rapidly science is evolving in our age of high-powered computers, AI, lasers, genetic engineering, and so much more, the best way to summarize our technological future is the American colloquialism “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

But should it?

Creative destruction has its destructive side: it can eliminate jobs, devalue human capital and capabilities, enrich the rich and impoverish the poor, and cause unprecedented environmental degradation. Many voices call for slowing it down, or “de-growth.” They point to the victims of asbestos, leaded gasoline, and chemical plants. They point to climate change and the dangers of nuclear weapons. They have a point. 

But we should keep in mind that today humanity faces unprecedented existential threats. It has to cope with global warming by coming up with techniques that cope with it. It needs to deal with a demographic transformation that has produced more and more octogenarians and fewer and fewer working women and men. It may face more pandemics. The only solution is to adapt and invent ourselves around these problems. History exemplifies how in the past ingenuity has solved the technical challenges of society, from smallpox vaccination to nitrogen fixing to cancer therapy. It must continue to do so – because any alternative will be disastrous.

Thank you very much.