Â鶹Éç
2026 Beatty Lecturer: Peter Howitt
How Do We Sustain Growth in an Age of Disruption — and Who Benefits?
Thursday, October 22 at 6 p.m.
Pollack Hall, Â鶹Éç
Tickets on sale August 19 at 9 a.m. ($5 student, $10 regular)
Online ticketing link will be available on this webpage
From steam engines and mass electrification to personal computers and artificial intelligence, technological innovation has transformed how we live and work, driving unprecedented economic growth.
Understanding how economic growth occurs—and how societies can sustain it—has been central to the work of Canadian economist and 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences laureate Peter Howitt, who will deliver the 2026 Beatty Lecture at Â鶹Éç on October 22 during the University’s annual Homecoming festivities. Nahlah Ayed, host of CBC’s national radio program Ideas, will moderate the event.
Howitt, a distinguished Â鶹Éç alumnus who earned an honours degree in Economics and Political Science in 1968, is Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Brown University.
Howitt was awarded the Nobel Prize for his foundational contributions to economic theory. In 1992, Howitt and fellow economist and joint winner of the Nobel Prize, Philippe Aghion, presented a mathematical model that demonstrated sustained prosperity is driven by “creative destruction,” a concept first proposed by economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1940s. Howitt and Aghion presented the model in a landmark 1992 Econometrica article, which has received over 17,000 research citations and become the foundation for decades of subsequent work on innovation and growth by economists and policymakers alike.
The implications of Howitt’s work are particularly relevant in an era of rapid and profound transformation, from the emergence of AI to the introduction of renewable energy technologies. While the model shows that creative destruction benefits societies by raising living standards, it also disrupts livelihoods as established products, skills, and ways of working are left behind.
“The models of economic growth that we had before, not only did they take technological progress as given, but they just assumed that everyone benefited from them, that technological progress just sort of fell like manna from heaven, and everybody got their share of it,” said Howitt in his .
His work has helped economists, policymakers, central banks, corporations and international institutions better understand how policy levers such as antitrust laws and research and development incentives must support technological change while mitigating its disruptive effects on markets, industries and workers.
Ěý
A lifelong fascination with economics
Born in Guelph, Ontario, Howitt’s journey to becoming one of the world’s leading economists began with a high school job at a wool brokerage that imported wool from around the world to sell to textile mills in Ontario and Quebec. Observing prices fluctuate on the office teletype machine and learning about supply and demand sparked a fascination that led him to pursue undergraduate studies at Â鶹Éç.
In with Â鶹Éç News following his Nobel win, Howitt said his time at Â鶹Éç “was a great experience for me. By the time I was finished, I was head over heels in love with economics.”
After graduating from Â鶹Éç, Howitt earned a master’s degree from Western University and a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. He taught at Western from 1972 to1996 while also holding visiting positions at UniversitĂ© Laval and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), UniversitĂ© Paris 1, and the UniversitĂ© de Toulouse. From 1996 to 2000, he taught at Ohio State University. In 2000, Howitt went to Brown University, where he was a professor of economics and social sciences until his retirement in 2013.
Howitt has studied almost all aspects of macroeconomics, with a special emphasis on the causes and consequences of inflation, the role of monetary policy in promoting economic stability, the causes of lasting unemployment, and the sources of economic growth.
Howitt is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Econometric Society, and a recipient of the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award. He served as president of the Canadian Economics Association from 1993 to 1994 and was an associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research from 1994 to 2002. He has also been a fellow-in-residence and international fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute for more than 25 years, and served as editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking from 1997 to 2000.