Eight Ways to know the Knowledge-based Economy

A public good, on the other hand, is not excludable nor is it rivalrous in consumption. Consider knowledge. Once something is known (especially if it is published, a term deriving from the Latin meaning to make public) it is hard to exclude others from learning it and if another does it does not thereby reduce the knowledge available to you.How can you have a market if the good being sold can be easily appropriated and its appropriation does not reduce ones inventory? As will be seen below it is only through Law contract and statutory that a market and therefore a knowledge-based economy can exist. And this is a market only for new knowledge created by statute, e.g., copyright, patent, registered industrial design and trademark, or, protected by secrecy. It is therefore a market born of government.

Put another way, without government there can be no knowledge- based economy.

I say a market for new knowledge because the vast, vast majority of knowledge resides in the public domain where it is freely available to any and all. Thus knowledge protected by intellectual property rights eventually falls into the public domain which is a virtual space where, as Isaac Newton noted, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Put another way, what begins as a public good is converted by Law into private property bought and sold for a limited time before again becoming a public good when it enters the public domain to fertilize the imagination of generation onto generation.

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