When he was a high schooler working part-time for a wool merchant in Ontario, Canada, Peter Howitt was enthralled by watching the prices of wool rise and fall on a small teletype machine. His supervisor explained the concepts of supply and demand, telling him, “If you really want to understand this, you have to go study economics,” Howitt recalled during a press conference last week.
Over 60 years after that fateful conversation with his supervisor, Howitt, a professor emeritus of economics at Brown, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences last Monday.
“At first I thought it was somebody’s practical joke. I really didn’t believe it,” Howitt said in an interview with The Herald. “It didn’t take long for them to persuade me that this was for real. And I’ve kind of been in shock ever since.”
Howitt’s research, which he conducted alongside co-laureate Philipe Aghion, a French microeconomist, explores the relationship between technological innovation and the economy. At the center of his work lies the concept of “creative destruction,” which Howitt described as the “big conflict between new technologies and old technologies.”
As Howitt explains it, while new inventions can bring some benefits, they also have the potential to generate losses for existing technologies. “For a lot of people, that’s a form of creative destruction,” Howitt said. When we “create new ideas and new innovations, new technologies, we destroy the value of old ones.”
This theory on the process of economic growth was first described by Joseph Schumpeter, an influential Austrian economist in the early 20th century.
Working alongside Aghion in the ’80s, Howitt mathematically modeled how the turbulent cycle of innovation eventually stabilizes and improves economies.
Howitt met Aghion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s.
“Every vehicle needs an accelerator and a brake, and he was mostly the accelerator,” Howitt said. “I was mostly the brake. We just clicked.”
But publishing their research was no walk in the park. The first iteration of their landmark paper, “A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction,” was produced in 1987 but was not published until 1992 when it was released in “Econometrica.”
“It took a long time to persuade these journal editors that it was worth taking seriously,” Howitt said. “Since then, it’s been cited almost 20,000 times.”
Howitt credits Brown with providing a community that was pivotal for his own development and successful career.
Colleagues and students were “really critical for my own professional development, and really just added to the enjoyment and the success of my whole academic voyage,” he said.
David Weil ’82, a professor of economics at Brown, wrote in an email to The Herald that Howitt is “unfailingly polite” and possesses “sheer enthusiasm” for his work.
“Sitting next to him in a seminar and listening to him carefully dissect a presentation in order to uncover its inner workings was both a delight and an education,” Weil wrote.
Weil also noted the tremendous impact that Howitt has had on the economics department at Brown, cementing the University’s standing as “a center of cutting-edge research on the topic of growth — a status it has maintained even after his retirement,” he wrote.
Howitt joined Brown’s faculty in 2000 after teaching at the University of Western Ontario and the Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1973 after attending McGill University for his bachelor’s degree. At Brown, Howitt taught macroeconomics courses, even after his retirement in 2013.
Howitt is “a true intellectual giant,” said Stelios Michalopoulos PhD’08, one of Howitt’s former graduate students who now serves as a professor of political economy at Brown.
“He was a true mentor, patient with my onboarding and often naive questions, and he discussed openly the potential pitfalls of the approach taken,” Michalopoulos wrote in an email to The Herald. “In a nutshell, an exemplary scholar.”
But Howitt’s impact has extended beyond Brown’s community. Another one of Howitt’s former graduate students, Quamrul Ashraf PhD’09, is now a professor for distinguished teaching and research of economics at Williams College.
“While the world is rightly celebrating his pathbreaking work with Philippe Aghion on Schumpeterian growth theory, what is equally remarkable is the breadth of his intellectual influence,” Ashraf wrote in an email to The Herald. “In my experience, he remains one of the clearest examples of how intellectual rigor and kindness can be complements rather than substitutes.”
While Howitt was very “generous with his time,” Ashraf remembered one occasion where teaching came second.
“When it came to preserving his golf outings with his wife Pat,” Howitt “guarded (these) with equal commitment,” Ashraf wrote. “That small but telling fact also speaks volumes about his devotion to his personal and family life.”
After a lifetime in economics, Howitt told The Herald he has thoroughly enjoyed his “intellectual journey” in academia.
“If you find an academic subject that really fascinates you, and you find that you enjoy the process of trying to figure out how to solve some of these intellectual problems,” Howitt said, you should just “go for it.”
