The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt celebrates innovation and creative destruction as the true engines of growth. Pakistan should listen: we protect the old and punish the new. Growth needs risk-takers, not rent-seekers, because innovation is not imported, it is built.

Mokyr’s insight was that sustained growth depends on a virtuous loop between understanding and doing. Artificial Intelligence can turbocharge that loop. By accelerating experimentation, generating hypotheses and even automating scientific discovery, AI is changing not only how we do things but how we know things.

Aghion and Howitt’s theory of creative destruction warns that innovation thrives when competition and incentives are balanced. Too much dominance stifles new entrants, while excessive competition discourages investment in research. Today’s AI landscape is shaped by a few global giants with enormous computing power and data access. The question for the world is whether this will lock innovation into a few hands or spread productivity across many.

For Pakistan, the........

© The Express Tribune