1) The document discusses knowledge as a classic commons problem that is non-rivalrous and non-subtractable, meaning consuming it does not reduce availability to others. 2) However, knowledge also faces high exclusion costs, making it difficult to exclude people from consuming it without paying, leading to underproduction. 3) This highlights a long-standing difficulty in economic history to produce useful knowledge due to these characteristics.

1. 1) Knowledge is a classic commons problem
2) As Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess point out, knowledge is a shared resource, but it is quite
different from the main focus of Ostrom’s work, which was resources that were common but
depletable (such as land, clean air, and water).
3) Knowledge is what economists would call a “classic non-rivalrous or non-subtractable good,” in
which adding a marginal user does not reduce the consumption of other users.
4) As a result, there is no danger of overexploitation.
5) The main danger is not a “tragedy of the commons” kind of problem but underproduction.
6) Because knowledge is also characterized by high exclusion costs, meaning that it is difficult to
force people to pay for knowledge once it is produced, there is a serious danger of consistent
underproduction of useful knowledge, as Arrow pointed out half a century ago.
7) This highlights a deep and pervasive difficulty in the economic history of the Industrial
Revolution.
The History of the Relation between knowledge and Science

2. • For Bayly, this development from knowledge as a collection of
unspecified skills to science as a societal subsystem comprised three
phases. The first phase was the creation of huge pools
of knowledge, such as museums and archives. He also refers to the
surveying and classificatory enterprises of natural history undertaken
by three European. These European enterprises, however, were not
solitary undertakings but had their counterparts in the creation of
herbaria and other collections in Africa, India or China, establishing,
for instance, the basis for local medical knowledge. In the second
phase, individual efforts were pursued to identify unifying principles,
while the third phase saw the establishment of a comprehensive
evolutionary theory by Darwin and others.

3. • The essential factor accounting for the rapid development
of European sciences was the commitment of nearly all
governments to invest in specialized administrative units
and infrastructures that supported science, as well as in
technical resources like the railroads. The precision and
reliability of scientific claims associated with government
institutions allowed them to enhance their legitimacy, which,
in turn, led to increased investments in this system by the
state. In the course of this process, science, now established
in complex institutions, became in Bayly’s analysis a globally
communicable achievement that turned into an instrument of
persuasion relying on cultural and scientific traditions in each
country.