I generally agree, but different people probably have different ideas about what is “enough” or a necessary supply of knowledge. One extreme example, Amish people value community over new knowledge and technology. Much of the knowledge and technology produced by either market and government has been more than the Amish want or need. While Amish have reasons for their choices, many non-Amish people do not eagerly welcome the disruptive aspects of new knowledge or technology. And attitudes vary by technology: human cloning, pesticides, genetic engineering of crops and livestock are examples of technologies for which significant number of people have expressed concerns and many may say we don’t need new knowledge in these areas, whether it is generated by private companies or the government funded institutions. People who work in education and research are probably more inclined to favor more knowledge over less in a general sort of way.
While patents provide an incentive for developing new technologies, the monopoly power they grant can also slow innovation. Some companies buy patents that might threaten their existing patent monopoly not to speed a new product to the market, but to prevent competitors from doing so and thereby prolong their existing monopoly.
Fair points! Economists are definitely aware of this problem with patents and have proposed alternative mechanisms involving government buyouts of patents/various patent reforms (these ideas are not just limited to economists, of course). But many are tricky to implement (you don't just want the government telling the firm what its patent is worth, and the firm has all the incentives to inflate the patent's value). This is why direct funding of R&D can be a better bet, if done well.
Regarding your other point, yes, some knowledge can be objectively bad, even without considering specific group's preferences. For example, we don't want more knowledge on how to torture people more effectively or how to build better computer viruses. So some knowledge is a "public good" and other knowledge is a "public bad". And some knowledge can have positive and negative spillovers/externalities (e.g., better weapons can be helpful for deterrence and technological progress more generally but harmful if used offensively).
The trickiest question is how do we deal with people's PREFERENCES about knowledge or specific kind of knowledge. One problem is that people may not understand all the potential benefits of a technology (e.g., genetic engineering of crops can produce crops with far fewer mutations than traditional breeding technology and at a lower cost). Another problem is that if we ban the generation of certain knowledge based purely on dislike of that knowledge (versus its actual applications), we open the door to banning other things as well, like dressing a certain way in public (which of course humanity has a long history of doing). I'm not saying preferences about these kinds of things are clearly illegitimate, but they are also not clearly legitimate.
Another thing to note is that generating knowledge and regulating its use are separate questions. You can ban a specific application of a new technology while still reaping any downstream benefits the knowledge generates, if there are any.
I generally agree, but different people probably have different ideas about what is “enough” or a necessary supply of knowledge. One extreme example, Amish people value community over new knowledge and technology. Much of the knowledge and technology produced by either market and government has been more than the Amish want or need. While Amish have reasons for their choices, many non-Amish people do not eagerly welcome the disruptive aspects of new knowledge or technology. And attitudes vary by technology: human cloning, pesticides, genetic engineering of crops and livestock are examples of technologies for which significant number of people have expressed concerns and many may say we don’t need new knowledge in these areas, whether it is generated by private companies or the government funded institutions. People who work in education and research are probably more inclined to favor more knowledge over less in a general sort of way.
While patents provide an incentive for developing new technologies, the monopoly power they grant can also slow innovation. Some companies buy patents that might threaten their existing patent monopoly not to speed a new product to the market, but to prevent competitors from doing so and thereby prolong their existing monopoly.
Fair points! Economists are definitely aware of this problem with patents and have proposed alternative mechanisms involving government buyouts of patents/various patent reforms (these ideas are not just limited to economists, of course). But many are tricky to implement (you don't just want the government telling the firm what its patent is worth, and the firm has all the incentives to inflate the patent's value). This is why direct funding of R&D can be a better bet, if done well.
Regarding your other point, yes, some knowledge can be objectively bad, even without considering specific group's preferences. For example, we don't want more knowledge on how to torture people more effectively or how to build better computer viruses. So some knowledge is a "public good" and other knowledge is a "public bad". And some knowledge can have positive and negative spillovers/externalities (e.g., better weapons can be helpful for deterrence and technological progress more generally but harmful if used offensively).
The trickiest question is how do we deal with people's PREFERENCES about knowledge or specific kind of knowledge. One problem is that people may not understand all the potential benefits of a technology (e.g., genetic engineering of crops can produce crops with far fewer mutations than traditional breeding technology and at a lower cost). Another problem is that if we ban the generation of certain knowledge based purely on dislike of that knowledge (versus its actual applications), we open the door to banning other things as well, like dressing a certain way in public (which of course humanity has a long history of doing). I'm not saying preferences about these kinds of things are clearly illegitimate, but they are also not clearly legitimate.
Another thing to note is that generating knowledge and regulating its use are separate questions. You can ban a specific application of a new technology while still reaping any downstream benefits the knowledge generates, if there are any.