The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy [Hardcover]

Joel Mokyr (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0691094837 | ISBN-13: 978-0691094830 | Publication Date: November 4, 2002

The growth of technological and scientific knowledge in the past two centuries has been the overriding dynamic element in the economic and social history of the world. Its result is now often called the knowledge economy. But what are the historical origins of this revolution and what have been its mechanisms? In The Gifts of Athena, Joel Mokyr constructs an original framework to analyze the concept of "useful" knowledge. He argues that the growth explosion in the modern West in the past two centuries was driven not just by the appearance of new technological ideas but also by the improved access to these ideas in society at large--as made possible by social networks comprising universities, publishers, professional sciences, and kindred institutions. Through a wealth of historical evidence set in clear and lively prose, he shows that changes in the intellectual and social environment and the institutional background in which knowledge was generated and disseminated brought about the Industrial Revolution, followed by sustained economic growth and continuing technological change.

Mokyr draws a link between intellectual forces such as the European enlightenment and subsequent economic changes of the nineteenth century, and follows their development into the twentieth century. He further explores some of the key implications of the knowledge revolution. Among these is the rise and fall of the "factory system" as an organizing principle of modern economic organization. He analyzes the impact of this revolution on information technology and communications as well as on the public's state of health and the structure of households. By examining the social and political roots of resistance to new knowledge, Mokyr also links growth in knowledge to political economy and connects the economic history of technology to the New Institutional Economics. The Gifts of Athena provides crucial insights into a matter of fundamental concern to a range of disciplines including economics, economic history, political economy, the history of technology, and the history of science.

Editorial Reviews

Review

For most economists, Mr. Mokyr included, the Industrial Revolution is categorically different from everything that preceded it. . . . [He] suggests that, over time, growth will win out, if only because the power of certain ideas is greater than the resistance to them. So much the better.
(Nic Schulz Wall Street Journal )

[A] masterful addition to literatures of economic history and economic growth. The product of a lifetime of scholarly study and reflection, Mokyr's book plainly did not spring full-blown from the head of Zeus. It merits a wide readership.
(William F. Shughart II EH.Net )

The Gifts of Athena is an impressive study that clearly reveals Mokyr's mastery of a large literature on industrialization and economic growth. . . . Joel Mokyr has long concerned himself with big questions and making connections that delineate historical processes in new and interesting ways. The Gifts of Athena with its special emphasis on the centrality of the 'knowledge economy,' amply testifies to his stature as a leading historian of the Industrial Revolution.
(Merritt Roe Smith Isis )

[A] fascinating, magisterial investigation into the wellsprings of modern economic growth and improved living standards. . . . The Gifts of Athena is a big-idea history book, a complex tale that interweaves science, technology, economics, sociology, and political science. . . . This is one that will stand the test of time.
(Christopher Farrell Business Week )

Mokyr argues that knowledge is the key to understanding many of the most important developments in the past two centuries. The book is impressively wide ranging in its scope, containing a vast array of information and ideas. . . . I would hesitate to say the Mokyr has solved the problems of why the industrial revolution happened, but he would appear to have advanced the story a long way. This book is a fascinating integration of intellectual and economic history
(Roger E. Backhouse American Historical Review )

Situated firmly at the intersection of several disciplines--the history of science and technology, economic history, and economics--this fascinating and stimulating book explores the relationships among the expansion of knowledge, technological change, and economic growth since the 18th century.
(Choice )

Joel Mokyr, as one of the most important economic historians of our time, has written an instructive book about the knowledge-based origins of the rise and the future persistence of the Western World. . . . This book should be read not only by scholars, but also by politicians!
(Helmut Braun Journal of European Economic History )

Review

Everyone talks about knowledge and technology, but Mokyr's brilliant book is the rare exception that talks about the what, when, why, and where of the knowledge revolution. The book skillfully navigates a vast territory from the Industrial Revolution to the World Wide Web, from the revolution in health to that in housework, from technophobia to institutions. Mokyr demolishes stereotypes and generates a steady stream of fresh facts and insights that keep you turning the pages.
(William Easterly, New York University, author of "The Elusive Quest for Growth" )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (November 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691094837
• ISBN-13: 978-0691094830
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,604,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Toward an economics of knowledge, January 11, 2003

By 

Royce E. Buehler "figvine" (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Hardcover)

Partly because it is too wide-ranging to settle on any sound-bite answer, this is one of the better books around to examine the question of the sources of the West's technological and economic supremacy.

In "The Gifts of Athena", Joel Mokyr sets his sights on three objectives: First, to establish that expanding knowledge has been the engine driving the world's expanding economy over the last few centuries, rather than the other way around. Second, to explore the factors that control the discovery and application of new knowledge, so as to get a better grasp on why the Industrial Revolution took place in Europe, and why England might have led the way. Finally, to speculate on what I found to be a startling question: what's to prevent the explosive expansion of technology to which we have become accustomed from falling into stagnation, as lesser periods of innovation have done throughout history?

He accomplishes the first objective handily. Apparently some economists believe that the Industrial Revolution must have been driven primarily by economic forces (new means of capitalization and rising demand) rather than by the availability of science, because of the multi-century lag from Kepler and Newton to the economic blastoff. But Mokyr argues that there was a necessary intermediate stage, the "Industrial Enlightenment", which structurally altered the relationship between "what-is" and "how-to" forms of knowledge, as well as making both forms radically more accessible to artisans, entrepeneurs, and the general public.

His explorations of the other two questions are fresh and illuminating, but a bit picaresque. There's no overarching theory here and, except for parts of the chapter on adoption of new technology by households, little quantitative rigor. Where the discussion excels is in its opening pages, which lay out a useful systematic language for talking about kinds and qualities of knowledge; in its readiness to think outside the market-explains-all box; and in its unflagging supply of vivid historical examples.

Among many piquant ideas, the central insight I brought away from this work was the extent to which the phenomenon of "science" is a collection of socially enabling institutions, rather than just a Baconian method. Not that Mokyr holds much brief for the notion that the conclusions of science are socially constructed. Rather, its conclusions become accepted and transmitted, and therefore available for economic use, only by the grace of a set of social relationships and conventions that Bacon's scheme did not mandate, and which might just as easily not have taken place.

I should note that where economics are concerned, I'm very much a layman, and not really even a particularly informed one. ("Oh, Schumpeter, yeah, I heard of him somewhere.") I found Mokyr's text challenging but frequently engaging, and comprehensible throughout.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thought Provoking But Could be Written Better, November 14, 2004

By 

R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Hardcover)

This is an interesting book devoted to the importance of knowledge in the formation of modern industrial economies. Mokyr has several goals. The first and most important is to illuminate the origins of the modern industrial economy. Others are to illustrate the impact of modern economy, particularly its knowledge based elements, on modern life, to discuss barriers to the acquisition and dissemination of knew and useful knowledge, and to discuss differences in economic behavior between firms and households. The quality of the book is somewhat uneven, possibly because this book is based on prior essays and lectures that Mokyr has prepared in the last decade. While the book certainly has a strong theme, the individual chapters don't allows cohere.
The initial part of the book is devoted to the thesis that a key, perhaps the key, feature leading to the genesis of the Industrial Revolution, was the birth in Western Europe of interest in "useful knowledge." This is not science per se, or engineering per se, but an amalgam of both driven by a desire to use knowledge of the natural world in ways that manipulate the natural world to human advantage. For Mokyr, the scientific revolution of the 17th century is a necessary precursor to the Industrial Revolution but the foundation of the Industrial Revolution is the Enlightenment's dedication to science, rationalism, its insistence that human activity can improve the lot of humanity, and its insistence on public dissemination of useful knowledge through publishing and education. The quintessential example of this crucial aspect of the Enlightenment is the Great Encyclopedia, dedicated to disseminating the best practices in virtually all areas of human activity. Mokyr makes a very good case that this basic attitude permeated much of Europe, from famous intellectuals to craftsman and business seeking to produce incremental improvements in production technologies. Implicit in Mokyr's discussion is that this attitude, set in the expanding societies of Western Europe, and coupled, particularly in Britain, with a society that encouraged capitalism, caused the Industrial Revolution. He argues, for example, that the development of the factory was driven in large part by the advantages of bringing expertise about most efficiect production practices under one roof.
Later sections of the book are devoted to the impact on households of emphasizing rational and useful knowledge. These sections stress the public health impacts of this aspect of industrialization. Mokyr has an interesting section on the differences between households and firms. He also discusses barriers to innovation with varying success. Parts of this discussion are good, parts are tendentious. A criticism of some parts of the book are that Mokyr resorts to the practice, common among economists, of using equations and graphs to make points, essentially using these tools as metaphors for his verbal descriptions. Since he is not actually analyzing data, this practice is at best redundant, and sometimes actually confusing.
Mokyr is at his best in making a strong argument for the role of knowledge in the genesis of the Industrial Revolution, and by implication, its role in our contemporary economies. He is gently but strongly critical of other views of birth of the Industrial Revolution, notably the idea that it was a direct result of European commerical capitalism. In this, he joins a number of other recent scholars who have been critical of this simple idea.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Knowledge as a Driver of Economic Growth, August 12, 2006

By 

Michael K. Bergman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Paperback)

This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in knowledge and its role in economic growth. "The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy," is a sweeping and comprehensive account of the period from 1760 (in what Mokyr calls the "Industrial Enlightenment") through the Industrial Revolution beginning roughly in 1820 and then continuing through the end of the 19th century. The book (and related expansions by Mokyr available as separate PDFs on the Internet) should be considered as the definitive reference on this topic to date. The book contains 40 pages of references to all of the leading papers and writers on diverse technologies from mining to manufacturing to health and the household. The scope of subject coverage, granted mostly focused on western Europe and America, is truly impressive.

Mokyr deals with `useful knowledge,' as he acknowledges Simon Kuznets` phrase. Mokyr argues that the growth of recent centuries was driven by the accumulation of knowledge and the declining costs of access to it. Mokyr helps to break past logjams that have attempted to link single factors such as the growth in science or the growth in certain technologies (such as the steam engine or electricity) as the key drivers of the massive increases in economic growth that coincided with the era now known as the Industrial Revolution.

Mokyr cracks some of these prior impasses by picking up on ideas first articulated through Michael Polanyi's "tacit knowing" (among other recent philosophers interested in the nature and definition of knowledge). Mokyr's own schema posits propositional knowledge, which he defines as the science, beliefs or the epistemic base of knowledge, which he labels omega, in combination with prescriptive knowledge, which are the techniques ("recipes"), and which he also labels lambda. Mokyr notes that an addition to omega is a discovery; an addition to lambda is an invention.

One of Mokyr's key points is that both knowledge types reinforce one another and, of course, the Industrial Revolution was a period of unprecedented growth in such knowledge. Another key point, easily overlooked when "discoveries" are seemingly more noteworthy, is that techniques and practical applications of knowledge can provide a multiplier effect and are equivalently important. For example, in addition to his main case studies of the factory, health and the household, he says: "The inventions of writing, paper, and printing not only greatly reduced access costs but also materially affected human cognition, including the way people thought about their environment."

Mokyr also correctly notes how the accumulation of knowledge in science and the epistemic base promotes productivity and still-more efficient discovery mechanisms: "The range of experimentation possibilities that needs to be searched over is far larger if the searcher knows nothing about the natural principles at work. To paraphrase Pasteur's famous aphorism once more, fortune may sometimes favor unprepared minds, but only for a short while. It is in this respect that the width of the epistemic base makes the big difference."

In my own opinion, I think Mokyr starts to get closer to the mark when he discusses knowledge "storage", access costs and multiplier effects from basic knowledge-based technologies or techniques. Like some other recent writers, he also tries to find analogies with evolutionary biology.

One of the real advantages of this book is to move forward a re-think of the "great man" or "great event" approach to history. There are indeed complicated forces at work. I think Mokyr summarizes well this transition when he states: "A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand peopled who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensible, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital of technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling."

There is so much to like and to be impressed with this book and even later Mokyr writings. My two criticisms are that, first, I found the pseudo-science of his knowledge labels confusing (I kept having to mentally translate the omega symbol) and I disliked the naming distinctions between propositional and prescriptive, even though I think the concepts are spot on.

My second criticism, a more major one, is that Mokyr notes, but does not adequately pursue, "In the decades after 1815, a veritable explosion of technical literature took place. Comprehensive technical compendia appeared in every industrial field." Statements such as these, and there are many in the book, hint at perhaps some fundamental drivers. Mokyr has provided the raw grist for answering his starting question of why such massive economic growth occurred in conjunction with the era of the Industrial Revolution. He has made many insights and posited new factors to explain this salutory discontinuity from all prior human history. But, in this reviewer's opinion, he still leaves the why tantalizingly close but still unanswered. The fixity of information and growing storehouses because of declining production and access costs remain too poorly explored.