The Gifts of Athena : Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy

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Summary: Peerless scholarship
Review: "Gifts of Athena" is an outstanding piece of work with profound consequences for research and policy. Its intellectual radiance will finally make the remaining shadows of conventional economic history fade into oblivion. It guides the perplexed, reassures the convinced and guides the uninitiated.

Rating:
Summary: Toward an economics of knowledge
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Thought Provoking But Could be Written Better
Review: 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.