By: Jianli Yang and James Davis
The winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics underscore how innovation and openness fuel progress—offering lessons for the US–China AI race and the fragility of growth.
The 2025 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt, could not be more timely. Their research explains how innovation, openness, and “creative destruction” sustain long-term growth—an insight that speaks directly to the world’s defining competition between the United States and China over artificial intelligence (AI). As AI reshapes the global economy, the laureates’ theories offer both a roadmap and a warning: societies that embrace openness and manage disruption can prosper, while those that suppress experimentation or isolate themselves risk stagnation.
For most of human history, stagnation was normal. Mokyr showed that sustained growth began only when invention was joined with scientific understanding—when people learned not only that something worked, but why. In his seminal work A Culture of Growth, Mokyr traced this transformation to… [Continue Reading]
Source: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/innovation-openness-and-the-ai-race-lessons-from-the-2025-nobel-laureates-in-economics