I always thought a simple solution to this would be to have the knowledge made open source if it was government funded in any way at all. That would be the big game changer.
The same should apply to medications. A lot of medication R&D is funded by the NIH at public universities, but private corporations get to patent the fruit of that research and charge Americans exorbitant amounts of money for them while enjoying government-enforced monopolies.
Good luck turning academic research into a mass manufactured product that is known to be both safe and effective without the billions of dollars of investment pharmaceutical companies put into doing that.
If you want to go into what the money does, you have to look at the drug approval requirements. The public demands, through regulatory agencies, very thorough, elaborate, and expensive clinical trials to prove safety and efficacy of all drugs. Somebody has to pay for that - both for the drugs that do succeed and make it to market, and also for all of the trials for drugs that people thought would work but turned out not to. This is basically high-stakes gambling, and the pharma companies need to make the money back somehow on the drugs that do get approved to make the whole system work. Gambling like this is risky, and any sane investor would want a pretty impressive return when they win in exchange for taking the risk of the loss.
If you don't have a solution for that, it rings rather hollow to complain about how evil the pharma companies supposedly are when they are only responding to the incentives that we created for them.
My statement is consistent with my belief that most drug research and development is a public good, and should be treated as such. Drugs shouldn't live or die based on whether companies think they that bringing them to market will generate windfalls for shareholders or not. I don't mind the state shouldering most of that responsibility, instead, for the benefit of the public.
The fact is, bringing a drug to market safely is a lot of work. All organizations respond to incentives, both corporations and governments. You can say it would be nice for the Government to do that work, but what is the incentive? In practice, most bureaucracies respond to incentives like individual actors minimizing their actual work and attempting to gain promotions. The practical incentives don't align very well with the work and risk associated with drug development. What bureaucrat wants to authorize the effort for a series of huge clinical trials for an experimental medication - they have a downside for failure, but not much upside for success.
This problem aligns far better with capitalism. Companies have incentive to do the work because they stand to make a windfall if they succeed. Governments don't.
I could be wrong of course. How would we test this? Well we have a pretty good free market for this right now - corporations are free to develop new drugs, and so are governments. Corporations develop lots and lots of new drugs at breakneck speeds. Governments by and large don't. Not that they never do, but it's a trickle, relatively speaking. If you want governments to develop more drugs, why not just do that now? Show us all how your solution can work.
The only way to do what you seem to want would be to actively prevent corporations from doing drug development work. So you would be actively preventing new drugs from being developed by organizations that are proven to be able to actually do it in favor of a setup that is demonstrated to work worse. In short, you would be actively making the world a worse place because you have some weird hangup about people making a profit off of something.
In fact much of physics research output is now freely on Arxiv. Doesn’t change the dynamics with journal prestige and securing funding, explained in the tweet thread.
You also want it to be available either for free or "at cost". That is, "open source" is only meaningful after you've received the software. Your solution doesn't prohibit me from requiring you to pay $500,000 to get my research software under the GPL.
Meant that if it was mandated by the government then Wikipedia would maybe accommodate them or other platforms would as well or new ones would be created.
