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.

"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.

To be useful a book on the creativity of societies and peoples which makes deductions based on what was invented, where and when, has to get the underlying facts approximately right. This book fails that test. For example it states that the water wheel was invented in the medieval period, clearly the author is not aware the famous Roman multiple water-wheel system in southern France so much visited by archaeological tourists. In the field of invention it is always to check the facts carefully as false claims are very often made. Thus many people still believe Edison's spurious claim to have invented the filament electric light despite the established fact that Swan preceded him.

I found this book made a fascinating subject really boring. I had a tough time finnishing it.

In all fairness, I learned quite a few interesting things. One of them being that the Greek civilization was not so great after all. This civilization developed great intellect, but no technological innovators. Their technology relied on harnessing the energy of their slaves period. They had no incentive to innovate, that would have caused an idle and restless underclass prone to civil unrest.

I am sure there must be another much more interesting book about the same subject.

This very interesting but relatively brief book is devoted to the role of technological innovation in economic history. In a series of well written and very well referenced chapters, Mokyr discusses the role of technological innovation as a motor of economic growth and social transformation. Topics covered include a general discussion of technological innovation and growth, narrative chapters on technological innovation in the Classical world, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Europe, and the Modern world up to about 1850, discussions of why China and Classical civilization failed to develop an industrial civilization, and a discussion of the analogy between technological innovation and organic evolution. This is a work of synthesis; Mokyr presents little novel information and draws heavily on an impressive body of existing scholarship. Mokyr presents some interesting and important conclusions. Technological innovation is not driven primarily by ordinary market forces. The Industrial Revolution was the culmination in many centuries of technological innovation dating back to the Middle Ages. The failure of China to develop an Industrial Revolution remains a persistent puzzle. By about 1400, Chinese civilization was the world leader in many key technologies but then slides back and is eventually overtaken and then explosively surpassed by Europe. An important point made by Mokyr is that no nation or culture was a perpetual locus of technological innovation. In Europe, innovations were most common in Italy during the Renaissance, followed by major sites in the Low Countries and Germany, followed by the British explosion. Europe, with its divided polities, may have been more conducive to the development of industrial technology. European intellectual and scientific traditions may also have favored the emergence of industrial technology. Whatever factors responsible, Mokyr concludes that the emergence of industrial technology was probably an unusual and highly contingent event. This is similar to the conclusion reached by Kenneth Pomerantz in his recent book, The Great Divergence, an explicit comparison of economic development in China, Japan, and Europe. These conclusions and analyses completely undermine the common and facile notions of European capitalism leading automatically to the success of European culture.