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The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy
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.
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.
384 pages, Paperback
First published November 4, 2002
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About the author
Joel Mokyr
37 books155 followersJoel Mokyr is a Netherlands-born American-Israeli economic historian. He is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history at Northwestern University, and Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv.
Joel Mokyr conducts research on the economic history of Europe, and specializes in the period 1750-1914. His current research is concerned with the understanding of the economic and intellectual roots of technological progress and the growth of useful knowledge in European societies, as well as the impact that industrialization and economic progress have had on economic welfare. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society as well as the British Academy, the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and the Dutch Royal Academy. He has been the President of the Economic History Association, editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. He is currently co-editor of a book series, the Princeton University Press Economic History of the World. He was the 2006 winner of the biennial Heineken Award for History offered by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history. His latest book is A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy, to be published by Princeton University Press in 2016. He has supervised over forty doctoral dissertations in the departments of Economics and History.
Joel Mokyr conducts research on the economic history of Europe, and specializes in the period 1750-1914. His current research is concerned with the understanding of the economic and intellectual roots of technological progress and the growth of useful knowledge in European societies, as well as the impact that industrialization and economic progress have had on economic welfare. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society as well as the British Academy, the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and the Dutch Royal Academy. He has been the President of the Economic History Association, editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. He is currently co-editor of a book series, the Princeton University Press Economic History of the World. He was the 2006 winner of the biennial Heineken Award for History offered by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history. His latest book is A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy, to be published by Princeton University Press in 2016. He has supervised over forty doctoral dissertations in the departments of Economics and History.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 3, 2012
Joel Mokyr is my favorite economist, historian, and intellectual merely for his devotion to details and creating a tenacious argument. This is the second book of his I read, after The Lever of Riches, which is better only for its expansive scope of identifying how various societies develop economically and others don't. I'm sorry Jared Diamond, but Mokyr nails it, drives it home, and puts it to bed: societies only prosper for their desire to create better technologies; Geography has little to do with it. The Gifts of Athena expands on this topic but focuses on knowledge passed from generation to generation, worker to apprentice, household to household (In one section, Mokyr devotes 50 or so pages and advanced calculus on mathematically expressing the importance of the household and its attention to cleanliness and health). If you can stomach the math and the incredibly esoteric, dense philosophical discussion of epistemology at the beginning, I recommend this book to be bought, read, and reread for as long as the spine can handle (I've solved this dilemma by purchasing it for my iPad)
October 22, 2018
Really enjoyed the model employed to explain phenomena. Unfortunately I don't think the evidence for it was compelling. Nevertheless I found that this book used very interesting sources of data. It's a good book I just don't think it achieves what it sets out to, which is to show that epistemic and technical knowledge are important variables in explaining paradigms. I think focusing purely on technical knowledge is sufficient.
January 22, 2010
Professor Mokyr was one of my economics professors at Northwestern University. From a footnote in one of Richard Florida's books on Creative Capital, I was directed to this book, 20 years after graduating with my economics degree. As I joked with my Professor over lunch in Evanston, after reading his book, he is even more interesting now, than he was in my Sophomore year... :-)
September 24, 2021
This is not much of a review of the book, just an overview of a fascinating chapter that discusses material not often encountered.
I thought The Gifts of Athena better as a review of some of the debates surrounding economic development than a slam dunk case for any one view. The most memorable chapter was on "Knowledge, Health, and the Household" describing the adoption of new knowledge and techniques by households and the impediments to such adoption. It stands out precisely because as the author writes, "much of the literature has , however, focused on this public dimension of health improvement, neglecting almost entirely the private learning by households. . . . Many of the important changes, however were occurring at the household level."
I suppose some of these observations are obvious, but usually the road to accepting best-practice are analyzed for the decisions businesses rather than than households make.
"Comparing alternatives, let alone evaluating the costs of type I and type II errors, was thus difficult, and many consumers continued to rely on traditional knowledge and old wives' tales in choosing recipes." "How do households pick and choose from the vast menu of techniques that they believe enhance their health?" Whatever the answer, it is significant because it probably had something to do with the fact that "changes in household knowledge and behavior may explain what may well be the greatest shock to Western demographic history (at least since the Black Death), namely the decline in infectious disease in the industrialized West after 1870 or so." These changes may have taken place "because scientists have increasingly influenced the way common people think about the natural world" writes Mokyr.
Major scientific revolutions bearing on health were the sanitarian and hygienic movement which began after 1815 (much aided by the growth of statistics), the germ theory of disease in the 19th century, and the knowledge that "small traces of certain substances [e.g., ascorbic acid, niacin] are crucial to human health." Two of the competing explanations for improved health are increased ingestion of "health-enhancing foods" and the idea that people experienced "reduced exposure" to dangerous microbes due to better public health measures.
Mokyr quotes the historian Humphreys as pointing out that "preventive medicine is an extraordinarily difficult concept to convey, given that if one is successful, nothing happens--the disease does no come, the baby does not die."
Apart from strictly health considerations, Mokyr discusses the influence on women. He writes "As Tomes points out, heavy-handed appeals to guilt did not apply to both sexes equally, and women were expected to be in charge of housekeeping and carried greater responsibility for preserving health." Perhaps this was related to the phenomenon of "More Work for Mother" in which the author Ruth Schartz Cowan in a book with a title by that name examines the increased number of hours of housework by women in light of increasing mechanization of household activities and declining fertility in industrialized countries. The most interesting suggestion is that "the relentless use of fear and guilt in persuading women to keep their homes cleaner and their diets better in order to sell them a range of goods" helped to create millions of overworked housewives. In addition to the advertising onslaught, there was a limited understanding of microbes on the part of many people so that overexertion seemed a reasonable precaution. One particular example is "the belief that household dust was the carrier of dangerous germs (especially tuberculosis), through dangerous "fomites" (dried contagious matter) stimulated an attack on household dust far beyond anything we would believe necessary today." I think we can forgive the hygiene mistakes of earlier generations as we are seeing the battle to overcome vaccine hesitation play out right before our eyes, though our grasp of the underlying science is so much more solid.
I thought The Gifts of Athena better as a review of some of the debates surrounding economic development than a slam dunk case for any one view. The most memorable chapter was on "Knowledge, Health, and the Household" describing the adoption of new knowledge and techniques by households and the impediments to such adoption. It stands out precisely because as the author writes, "much of the literature has , however, focused on this public dimension of health improvement, neglecting almost entirely the private learning by households. . . . Many of the important changes, however were occurring at the household level."
I suppose some of these observations are obvious, but usually the road to accepting best-practice are analyzed for the decisions businesses rather than than households make.
"Comparing alternatives, let alone evaluating the costs of type I and type II errors, was thus difficult, and many consumers continued to rely on traditional knowledge and old wives' tales in choosing recipes." "How do households pick and choose from the vast menu of techniques that they believe enhance their health?" Whatever the answer, it is significant because it probably had something to do with the fact that "changes in household knowledge and behavior may explain what may well be the greatest shock to Western demographic history (at least since the Black Death), namely the decline in infectious disease in the industrialized West after 1870 or so." These changes may have taken place "because scientists have increasingly influenced the way common people think about the natural world" writes Mokyr.
Major scientific revolutions bearing on health were the sanitarian and hygienic movement which began after 1815 (much aided by the growth of statistics), the germ theory of disease in the 19th century, and the knowledge that "small traces of certain substances [e.g., ascorbic acid, niacin] are crucial to human health." Two of the competing explanations for improved health are increased ingestion of "health-enhancing foods" and the idea that people experienced "reduced exposure" to dangerous microbes due to better public health measures.
Mokyr quotes the historian Humphreys as pointing out that "preventive medicine is an extraordinarily difficult concept to convey, given that if one is successful, nothing happens--the disease does no come, the baby does not die."
Apart from strictly health considerations, Mokyr discusses the influence on women. He writes "As Tomes points out, heavy-handed appeals to guilt did not apply to both sexes equally, and women were expected to be in charge of housekeeping and carried greater responsibility for preserving health." Perhaps this was related to the phenomenon of "More Work for Mother" in which the author Ruth Schartz Cowan in a book with a title by that name examines the increased number of hours of housework by women in light of increasing mechanization of household activities and declining fertility in industrialized countries. The most interesting suggestion is that "the relentless use of fear and guilt in persuading women to keep their homes cleaner and their diets better in order to sell them a range of goods" helped to create millions of overworked housewives. In addition to the advertising onslaught, there was a limited understanding of microbes on the part of many people so that overexertion seemed a reasonable precaution. One particular example is "the belief that household dust was the carrier of dangerous germs (especially tuberculosis), through dangerous "fomites" (dried contagious matter) stimulated an attack on household dust far beyond anything we would believe necessary today." I think we can forgive the hygiene mistakes of earlier generations as we are seeing the battle to overcome vaccine hesitation play out right before our eyes, though our grasp of the underlying science is so much more solid.
August 18, 2025
The historical analysis of how knowledge influenced the early industrial revolution and medicine is useful but readers would have been better served if Mokyr didn't include his theoretical/philosophical analyses. Those parts are superficial and the book could have been much leaner and more readable. Unconventional terms like "omega/lambda-knowledge" and "epistemic base" didn't add much to the discussion.
August 15, 2024
Thought provoking book on history of technological progress. Language and formulations were rather opaque at times but lots of interesting insights nonetheless.
November 26, 2022
There is no one single recipe or formula for economic growth but this work creates a path
for humans to understand the necessary (not sufficient) conditions of useful knowledge. Whether
useful knowledge is the right term to be used for the link between European enlightenment and the
subsequent economic in the nineteenth century is of concern, as it seems like a term one would
assign to a resultant and not the cause. Joel Mokyr’s work seems to stress on
particular events and a set of conditions in economic history giving a reader the perception that
these conditions are hard to replicate because of the domino effect of the original turnkey
events. This is unlike the less academic and more popular science reference ‘Guns, Germs and
Steel’, by Jared Diamond, a historian with an anthropological background, which attributes
geographical endowments for the scale and the time taken for societies to be self-sufficient even in isolation like the aboriginals of Australia or the African savannah as the key reasons for the
spread of technology in a latitudinal fashion over large distances. It is also unlike David Landes’
‘The Unbound Prometheus’ which takes the position that the Industrial Revolution was a part of a
larger modernization process. Overall while Mokyr’s work is a useful way of understanding the
non-technological factors involved in Industrial Revolution, the evidence embedded between
concepts is not always very compelling. For example, Mokyr states that technological innovations
increase our effort in household work but the examples provided for that do not seem adequate.
for humans to understand the necessary (not sufficient) conditions of useful knowledge. Whether
useful knowledge is the right term to be used for the link between European enlightenment and the
subsequent economic in the nineteenth century is of concern, as it seems like a term one would
assign to a resultant and not the cause. Joel Mokyr’s work seems to stress on
particular events and a set of conditions in economic history giving a reader the perception that
these conditions are hard to replicate because of the domino effect of the original turnkey
events. This is unlike the less academic and more popular science reference ‘Guns, Germs and
Steel’, by Jared Diamond, a historian with an anthropological background, which attributes
geographical endowments for the scale and the time taken for societies to be self-sufficient even in isolation like the aboriginals of Australia or the African savannah as the key reasons for the
spread of technology in a latitudinal fashion over large distances. It is also unlike David Landes’
‘The Unbound Prometheus’ which takes the position that the Industrial Revolution was a part of a
larger modernization process. Overall while Mokyr’s work is a useful way of understanding the
non-technological factors involved in Industrial Revolution, the evidence embedded between
concepts is not always very compelling. For example, Mokyr states that technological innovations
increase our effort in household work but the examples provided for that do not seem adequate.
Want to read
September 12, 2012
Read
April 21, 2012Way pass expiry date, gotta return it to the library. Will finish it another time !
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews