The Political Economy of useful knowledge of Joel Mokyr

The article outlines the main provisions of the new work on the knowledge economy of contemporary American scholar Joel Mokyr. In "The Gifts of Athena" Joel Mokyr argues that rapid economic growth in the West over the past two centuries has been associated not only with the advent of modern technical ideas, but also with a significant improvement in access to these ideas in society. This access expansion was made possible by access to social networks consisting of universities, publishing houses, clubs of specialists engineers, etc.