The Commons of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

In this paper prepared for the Miller Upton Forum on the Wealth and Well-Being of Nations, Joel Mokyr examines the ways in which “useful knowledge” — knowledge that can be applied to a wide variety of practical applications — is a common pool resource, and therefore presents all the problems associated with CPR management. The incentive problem with this particular CPR is not that it will be overused, but that it will be under-produced. Mokyr describes how intellectual societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries solved this problem by incentivizing the creation of useful knowledge even though there was usually no direct remuneration for doing so.

Keywords: common pool resources, knowledge, incentives