Three professors who look at how innovation — including technology — drives economic growth will share the Nobel memorial prize in economics. The winners are Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University; Philippe Aghion of France, who teaches in Paris and London; and Peter Howitt, a Canadian who works at Brown University in Rhode Island. Their work also serves as a warning that history shows growth isn't inevitable, and it has to be nurtured. 

Marketplace senior economics contributor Chris Farrell has reviewed some of the work from the prize winners and joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio.

David Brancaccio: You've actually followed the work of at least one of these winners. Why'd they win?

Chris Farrell: These three essentially economic historians, I mean, they have delved deep into the most important question in economics: What makes economies grow? What's behind technological change and innovation? What leads to long-term, sustained economic growth.

Brancaccio: Right. I mean, it's the most important economic question: If this leads to bringing prosperity to actual human beings. Now, Joel Mokyr is a scholar that you've actually read into prior to this announcement.

Farrell: Oh, and I would recommend for anybody to read his books — "The Lever of Riches," a collection of essays, "The Gifts of Athena." He's just a brilliant economic historian. And what he's delved into, David, is he looks at, behind growth, it's not coal or capital — you know, money. When you look at the Industrial Revolution, it's a society that valued curiosity, experimentation, practical problem-solving; inventors and scientists were celebrated. It's about the importance of ideas and those institutions that support the ideas and the network effect of people exchanging ideas in their experiments.

Brancaccio: When you look at the work of these three scholars, Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion of France, and Peter Howitt at Brown, you know, the person I think of as Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, the creative destruction guy. He thought a lot about, for instance, entrepreneurship and how it plays into economic growth.

Farrell: Right, and this is absolutely critical: I mean, growth is not steady. And you've looked at those charts, David, right, over 200 years, where you can barely see the Great Depression in there, right? It looks remarkably smooth. But the closer you get to history and economic history, the more you realize, new companies rise, old ones fall, entire industries are reshaped. And so Aghion, one of the things that he's well-known for is looking about, you know, policies around education, competition, finance — how these affect whether societies get the kind of innovation that you want, the kind of innovation that leads to economic growth. Or, it may lead to economic destruction.

Brancaccio: And Peter Howitt, I mean, he really also takes a very close look at economic history focusing on the U.K. Industrial Revolution.

Farrell: Yes, he's largely focused on Britain. And it's about, you know, you look over the past two centuries or so, how do economies adapt to shocks, wars, new technologies? And one of the things that the Nobel committee made very clear is one of the reasons why they awarded the prize to these economists at this particular point in time is largely the rise of AI and all the disruptions that AI may have for our society and what the impact may be on economic growth. So although these are economic historians, this is really a prize about a society and an economy of AI.