The Gifts of Athena
Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy
By Joel MokyrPrinceton University Press
Copyright © 2002 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12013-3
Contents
Preface..........................................................................................................xiChapter 1: Technology and the Problem of Human Knowledge.........................................................1Chapter 2: The Industrial Enlightenment: The Taproot of Economic Progress........................................28Chapter 3: The Industrial Revolution and Beyond..................................................................78Chapter 4: Technology and the Factory System.....................................................................119Chapter 5: Knowledge, Health, and the Household..................................................................163Chapter 6: The Political Economy of Knowledge: Innovation and Resistance in Economic History.....................218Chapter 7: Institutions, Knowledge, and Economic Growth..........................................................284References.......................................................................................................299Index............................................................................................................339
Chapter One
Technology and the Problem of Human Knowledge
Introduction
The growth of human knowledge is one of the deepest and most elusive elements in history. Social scientists, cognitive psychologists, and philosophers have struggled with every aspect of it, and not much of a consensus has emerged. The study of what we know about our natural environment and how it affects our economy should be of enormous interest to economic historians. The growth of knowledge is one of the central themes of economic change, and for that reason alone it is far too important to be left to the historians of science.
Discoveries, inventions, and scientific breakthroughs are the very stuff of the most exciting writing in economic history. In what follows, my approach relies heavily on the history of science, but it differs from much current writing in that it addresses squarely the issues of modern economic growth. Through most of human history—including the great watershed of the Industrial Revolution—new knowledge appeared in a haphazard and unpredictable manner, and economic history is thus subject to similar contingencies. It therefore needs a special approach if it is to come to grips with modern economic growth, one that will take into consideration the untidy nature of the historical processes that created modern economic civilization of the past quarter-millennium.
In this book I am not explicitly concerned with "modernization," a terms that has fallen on hard times. Economic modernization is associated with industrialization, yet economic performance improved in services and agriculture. This book does not consider such "modernist" trends as urbanization, the rise of a powerful and centralized state, the increase in political freedom and participation, and the growth in literacy and education. It starts from the basic and mundane observation that economic performance, our ability to tease out material comforts from niggardly nature, has improved immensely in the past two centuries.
The relationship between economic performance and knowledge seems at first glance obvious if not trite. Simply put, technology is knowledge, even if not all knowledge is technological. To be sure, it is hard to argue that differences in knowledge alone can explain the gaps in income between the prosperous West and poor nations elsewhere. If that were all that differed, surely knowledge would flow across boundaries. Yet nobody would seriously dispute the proposition that living standards today are higher than in the eleventh century primarily because we know more than medieval peasants. We do not say that we are smarter (there is little evidence that we are), and we cannot even be sure that we are richer than we used to be because we are better educated (although of course we are). The central phenomenon of the modern age is that as an aggregate we know more. New knowledge developed in the past three centuries has created a great deal of social conflict and suffering, just as it was the origin of undreamed-of wealth and security. It revolutionized the structures of firms and households, it altered the way people look and feel, how long they live, how many children they have, and how they spend their time. Every aspect of our material existence has been altered by our new knowledge.
But who is "we"? What is meant by a society "knowing" something, and what kind of knowledge really matters? For the economic historian, these propositions prompt further questions. Who knew that which was "known"? What was done with this knowledge? How did people who did not possess it acquire it? In short, the insights of economic theory need to be coupled with the facts and narratives of the history of science and technology.
Useful Knowledge: Some Definitions
I am neither qualified nor inclined to deal with the many subtleties of epistemology and cognitive science that a thorough treatment of knowledge as a historical force requires. Instead this book takes a simple and straightforward approach to knowledge and its role in technological and economic change. It asks how new knowledge helped create modern material culture and the prosperity it has brought about.
What kind of knowledge do I have in mind? My interest in what follows is confined to the type of knowledge I will dub useful knowledge. The term "useful knowledge" was used by Simon Kuznets (1965, pp. 85–87) as the source of modern economic growth. One could debate at great length what "useful" means. In what follows, I am motivated by the centrality of technology. Because technology in its widest sense is the manipulation of nature for human material gain, I confine myself to knowledge of natural phenomena that exclude the human mind and social institutions. Jewish tradition divides all commands into commands that are between a person and makom (literally "place," but actually the deity) and between a person and chavayro (other people). In epistemology such distinctions are hazardous, yet it seems to me that roughly speaking there is a kind of knowledge accumulated when people observe natural phenomena in their environment and try to establish regularities and patterns in them. This knowledge is distinct from knowledge about social facts and phenomena. To be sure, a great deal of important knowledge, including economic knowledge, involves people and social phenomena: knowledge about prices, laws, relationships, personalities, the arts, literature, and so on. I should add right away that some "technologies" are based on the regularities of human behavior (e.g., management science and marketing) and therefore might be considered part of this definition. It could also be argued that economic knowledge (e.g., about prices or rates of return on assets) should be included, as it is necessary for efficient production and distribution. Despite some gray areas, in which the two overlap, I shall maintain this definition. Hence useful knowledge throughout this book deals with natural phenomena that potentially lend themselves to manipulation, such as artifacts, materials, energy, and living beings.
Economists often make a distinction between the growth of the stock of useful best-practice knowledge and its effective diffusion and utilization by all economies that have access to it. Their work is concerned with the latter; what follows is primarily about the former. The complementarity between the two is obvious. The idea that changes in useful knowledge are a crucial ingredient in economic growth seems so self-evident as to make elaboration unnecessary, were it not that with some notable exceptions—especially the work of the Stanford school embodied in the work of Nathan Rosenberg and Paul David—economists rarely have dealt with it explicitly. Even the "New Growth Theory," which explicitly tries to incorporate technology as one of the variables driven by human and physical capital, does not try to model the concept of useful knowledge and its change over time explicitly. Much in the tradition of A. P. Usher (1954), what I propose here is to look at technology in its intellectual context.
A Theory of Useful Knowledge
Useful knowledge as employed throughout the following chapters describes two types of knowledge. One is knowledge "what" or propositional knowledge (that is to say, beliefs) about natural phenomena and regularities. Such knowledge can then be applied to create knowledge "how," that is, instructional or prescriptive knowledge, which we may call techniques. In what follows, I refer to propositional knowledge as Ω-knowledge and to prescriptive knowledge as λ-knowledge. If Ω is episteme, λ is techne. This distinction differs in important respects from the standard distinctions between science and technology that have produced a vast literature but has increasingly come under scrutiny. It is also different from the distinction between "theory" and "empirical knowledge."
Who are the people who "know"? Knowledge resides either in people's minds or in storage devices (external memory) from which it can be retrieved. From the point of view of a single agent, another's mind is a storage device as well. The "aggregate" propositional knowledge in a society can then be defined simply as the union of all the statements of such knowledge contained in living persons' minds or storage devices. I call this set Ω. A discovery then is simply the addition of a piece of knowledge hitherto not in that set. Society "knows" something if at least one individual does. In this kind of model the social nature of knowledge is central: learning or diffusion would be defined as the transmission of existing knowledge from one individual or device to another. Similarly, I will refer to the union of all the techniques known to members of society or in accessible storage devices as the set λ.
The idea underlying this book is the proposition that Ω-knowledge serves as the support for the techniques that are executed when economic production takes place. For an inventor to write a set of instructions that form a technique, something about the natural processes underlying it must be known in this society. Before I can elaborate on this relationship, a few more details about the nature of Ω and λ should be clarified.
What is propositional knowledge? It takes two forms: one is the observation, classification, measurement, and cataloging of natural phenomena. The other is the establishment of regularities, principles, and "natural laws" that govern these phenomena and allow us to make sense of them. Such a definition includes mathematics insofar as mathematics is used to describe and analyze the regularities and orderliness of nature. This distinction, too, is not very sharp, because many empirical regularities and statistical observations could be classified as "laws" by some and "phenomena" by others. Useful knowledge includes "scientific" knowledge as a subset.
Science, as John Ziman (1978) has emphasized, is the quintessential form of public knowledge, but propositional knowledge includes a great deal more: practical informal knowledge about nature such as the properties of materials, heat, motion, plants, and animals; an intuitive grasp of basic mechanics (including the six "basic machines" of classical antiquity: the lever, pulley, screw, balance, wedge, and wheel); regularities of ocean currents and the weather; and folk wisdoms in the "an-apple-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away" tradition. Geography is very much part of it: knowing where things are is logically prior to the set of instructions of how to go from here to there. It also includes what Edwin Layton (1974) has termed "technological science" or "engineering science" and Walter Vincenti (1990) has termed "engineering knowledge," which is more formal than folk wisdom and the mundane knowledge of the artisan, but less than science. Engineering knowledge concerns not so much the general "laws of nature" as the formulation of quantitative empirical relations between measurable properties and variables, and imagining abstract structures that make sense only in an engineering or a chemical context, such as the friction-reducing properties of lubricants or simple chemical reactions (Ferguson, 1992, p. 11). The focus on whether "science" or "theory" served as a basis of technology before 1850 has been a source of confusion to economic historians concerned with the intellectual roots of economic change, as I argue below.
It seems pointless, furthermore, to argue about whether components of Ω are "correct" or not. Theories and observations about nature may have been of enormous practical influence and yet be regarded today as "incorrect." As long as they are believed to be true by some members of society, they will be in Ω. Hence Ω can contain elements of knowledge that are mutually inconsistent. For centuries, techniques in use were based on pieces of Ω that are no longer accepted, such as the humoral theory of disease or phlogiston chemistry, yet that hardly lessens their historical significance. Knowledge can be in dispute and speculative, or it can be widely accepted, in which case I will call it "tight." Tightness is a measure of consensualness of a piece of knowledge. It depends on the effectiveness of justification, the extent to which rhetorical conventions accepted in a society persuade people that something is "true," "demonstrated," or at least "tested." Tightness is a function of the ease of verifiability, and it determines the confidence that people have in the knowledge and—what counts most for my purposes—thus their willingness to act upon it. Such rhetorical conventions can vary from "Aristotle said" to "the experiment demonstrates" to "the estimated coefficient is 2.3 times its standard error." These rhetorical rules are pure social constructs, but they are not independent of how and why knowledge, including "useful" knowledge, grows over time.
Tightness has two dimensions: confidence and consensus. The tighter a piece of knowledge is, the more certain the people who accept it are of their beliefs, and the less likely it is that many people hold views inconsistent with it. Flat Earth Society members and those who believe that AIDS can be transmitted by mosquito bites may be few in number, but many Americans still do not believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution and believe in the possibility of predicting human affairs by looking at the stars. On this point it is hard to disagree with the thrust of the postmodernist critiques of rationalist accounts of the history of useful knowledge: truth is to a large extent what society believes on the basis of what authorities and experts tell the rest is the truth. Hence questions of politics (for example, who appoints these authorities and experts, and who sets their research agenda) permeate the search for useful knowledge and its deployment.
In the end, what each individual knows is less important than what society as a whole knows and can do. Even if very few individuals in a society know quantum mechanics, the practical fruits of the insights of this knowledge to technology may still be available just as if everyone had been taught advanced physics. For the economic historian, what counts is collective knowledge. But collective knowledge as a concept raises serious aggregation issues! how do we go from individual knowledge to collective knowledge beyond the mechanical definitions employed above?
Progress in exploiting the existing stock of knowledge will depend first and foremost on the efficiency and cost of access to knowledge. Although knowledge is a public good in the sense that the consumption of one does not reduce that of others, the private costs of acquiring it are not negligible, in terms of time, effort, and often other real resources as well (Reiter, 1992, p. 3). When the access costs become very high, it could be said in the limit that social knowledge has disappeared. Language, mathematical symbols, diagrams, and physical models are all means of reducing access costs. Shared symbols may not always correspond with the things they signify, as postmodern critics believe, but as long as they are shared they reduce the costs of accessing knowledge held by another person or storage device.
What makes knowledge a cultural entity, then, is that it is distributed to, shared with, and acquired from others; if that acquisition becomes too difficult, Ω-knowledge will not be accessible to those who do not have it but are seeking to apply it. Between the two extreme cases of a world of "episodic knowledge" as it is said to exist among animals and a world in which all knowledge is free and accessible at no cost, there is a reality in which some knowledge is shared, but access to it requires the person acquiring it to expend real resources. Access costs depend on the technology of access, the trustworthiness of the sources, and the total size of Ω; the larger Ω, the more specialization and division of knowledge is required. Experts and special sources dispensing useful information will emerge, providing access. Information technology (IT) is exactly about that. Given that access costs vary across economies, it is an oversimplification to assume that the stock of usable knowledge is common and freely available to all countries.
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. But external memory came at a cost in that it codified and in some cases crystallized useful knowledge and gave it an aura of unassailability and sanctity that sometimes hampered the continuous revision and perfection. All the same, the insight that the invention of external storage of information is much like networking a computer that previously was stand-alone has some merit. Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979) has argued that the advent of printing created the background on which the progress of science and technology rests. In her view, printing created a "bridge over the gap between town and gown" as early as the sixteenth century, and while she concedes that "the effect of early printed technical literature on science and technology is open to question" she still contends that print made it possible to publicize "socially useful techniques" (pp. 558, 559).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Gifts of Athenaby Joel Mokyr Copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
