New Delhi, Oct. 17 -- By awarding the 2025 Prize in Economic Sciences to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, the Nobel Committee paid homage to a version of economic history centred on ideas, disruption and renewal.

For four decades, these economists have chronicled the machinery of modern progress. Mokyr, the historian, traced how Europe's "industrial enlightenment" transformed curiosity into capital.

Aghion and Howitt built the mathematics of that insight into a model of 'creative destruction,' where each wave of discovery replaces the last.

Together, they gave economics its most optimistic parable: that ideas, unlike oil or land, are infinite. But optimism, like economic growth, is a resource that depletes.

This Nobel, th...