Does Progress Have a Future? Joel Mokyris Gifts of Athena

Where did the universe come from? Cosmologists ask this question of the physical universe. In The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002, $35), Joel Mokyr asks it of the economic universe. "[T]he rise of the western economies based on economic growth and technological progress is the central event of modern history. Nothing else even comes close. But how to explain it?" (p. 285). For Mokyr, the modern economy is a "miracle" (p. 288), and he is as full of wonder about its origins as cosmologists are about the emergence of the cosmos from a grapefruit-sized glitch in space-time.

In The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990), Mokyr argued that "technological creativity was at the very base of the rise of the West. It was the lever of its riches" (p. vii). In The Gifts of Athena, his purpose is to probe more deeply into the role of "useful knowledge" in stimulating technological creativity. "Simply put, technology is knowledge, even if not all knowledge is technological. . . . The central phenomenon of the modern age is that as an aggregate we know more" (p. 2). Gifts examines the complicated questions embedded in the assertion that "we know more": who "we" are, how society can be said to "know," what is known, and how more knowledge becomes a source of more wealth.

A primary contribution of this important book is to reframe the problem of the relationship between science and technology. This is a well-worn—some would say worn-out—intellectual path, which Mokyr reworks to make it into a more promising route for future inquiry. He focuses on the role of "useful knowledge," which "deals with natural phenomena that potentially lend themselves to manipulation, such as artifacts, materials, energy, and living beings" (p. 3). Knowledge, he contends, can be highly useful in economic terms even if it does not fit the usual definition of scientific knowledge. Mokyr goes on to subdivide useful knowledge into "what" and "how" knowledge. "What," or propositional, knowledge, includes beliefs about natural phenomena and regularities; "how," or prescriptive, knowledge includes techniques that serve as a basis for action. Condensing this into a symbolic shorthand, Mokyr labels propositional knowledge W-knowledge and prescriptive knowledge -knowledge. "If is episteme, is techne" (p. 4).

After laying out this analytical framework, Mokyr applies it to the origins of the Industrial Revolution, the Industrial Revolution itself, the second Industrial Revolution, and, with a significant question mark, the "Third Industrial Revolution?" (p. 105). Of particular interest is his discussion of what he calls the Industrial Enlightenment, "a set of social changes that transformed the two sets of useful knowledge and the relationship between them" (p. 35). Mokyr convincingly argues that the Industrial Enlightenment is the missing link that connects the scientific revolution with the Industrial Revolution—a link that may seem intuitively obvious, but that historians have had difficulty in demonstrating. Mokyr further argues that the Industrial Enlightenment "was not a British but a Western phenomenon" (p. 76). Throughout the book, as in The Lever of Riches, he emphasizes that the West, as a region, had advantages in technological and economic development because of its social and political nonuniformities.

Mokyr then applies his concept of useful knowledge to two particular sites, factories and households. As an economist, he approaches history as a set of problems or puzzles that need to be solved. So, for example, he seeks to explain why factories emerged during the Industrial Revolution and concludes that "technology and knowledge to a large extent drove the emergence of the factory, by determining the relative costs of the benefits of moving people as opposed to moving information" (p. 120). Mokyr then confronts the Cowan conundrum: "Why did homemakers work longer hours in their homes in the century after 1870, despite the growing mechanization of household activities?" (p. 199). Again applying...