“Winning the Nobel Prize is very good,” says Philippe Aghion, as the recently crowned economics laureate eyes up the dim sum options at a quiet pan-Asian restaurant on Paris’s left bank. “But the important thing is the influence you have.”

Aghion won the Nobel last month alongside Joel Mokyr and Peter Howitt for their work showing how innovation drives sustained economic growth. His work gives him heft in Europe and his native France, where he weighs in on everything from wealth taxes to whether AI will power a new dawn of sustained productivity growth or turf thousands out of their jobs.

He also has a long association with Emmanuel Macron. The professor stresses he is not an adviser in an official capacity, but one élysée official has told me Aghion provided the “economic matrix for Macronism”.