Efficiency can be measured in a number of ways. Saying one thing is more efficient than another is actually pretty meaningless unless you're defining what you're talking about exactly. I sort of discuss an issue tangentally related to this here
here in relation to mapping data in the public domain.
There's a lot that can be said here, and my original post on this subject was going to be more than 3000 words. I've tried to cut it down, but it's still too long. All of this is a gross oversimplification I realise, but I tried to avoid saying "Of course, in reality...." after every statement.
1. The disadvantage of multiple (private) projects to tackle a problem is that a great amount of effort is spent repeating work that's already been done. (In real terms, it's not quite like this - scientific journals etc means there's a lot of public science contributing to these projects even indirectly). But in a worst case scenario, a cure for AIDS (which we'll say = CostX) is going to CostY = CostX * (Number of Competing Private Projects To Cure AIDS).
2. However thwe advantage of multiple (private or public) projects to tackle the same problem is that any one of them could yield results by tackling things in a different way. Curing AIDS is not riding a treadmill, it's not a case of simply pouring an amount of resources into a hole until it's filled. It could be that AIDS is cured by a startup after only £50k of investment. We won't know until it's done (to an extent).
3. So, we don't know how much the cure for AIDS will cost. In the worst case scenario in [1] a cure might cost £10bn, there are ten firms all following the same path (or a close approximation) and so £100bn will be spent - £90bn which will be "wasted" (again, this is not how things work in the real world, that much money being spent would have numerous side-benefits). The benefit to the cure for AIDS (aside from the people being cured I mean) would go to soley to the patent holder.
4. The traditional market response is that this is good. Crap drug companies go out of business, winners prevail. People take a risk by investing in drugs companies and then get the reward when something like this comes up. But I'm not sure that's an accurate representation of investment in large publicly listed companeis. To quote Mr Nodrog :
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nodrog
Also its worth pointing out that even when it comes to large corporations, talking about 'ownership' can be a bit nebulous anyway - a public company is owned by its shareholders, and in practice these can just be average people (the 'workers' if you will, and in the case of companies which give stock options this is literally true). Even when you have larger shareholders like saving banks and (eg) pension funds invested by trustees, this will be money which in some way represents the savings of average people
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So both risk and reward are actually spread (albeit highly unevenly) through society. You might benefit more than your neighbour because GlaxoSmithKline win the "AIDS-cure race" and your pension funds has more GSK shares than your neighbours (whose pension funds were more tilted towards AstraZenaca or Pfizer or whomever).
In summary : It's complex. A single united project (either by all the drugs companies working together but still privately or by a single government project) could be more "efficient" by curing AIDS for a total cost to society of £10bn instead of £100bn by eliminating duplication of work. Or it could be that a single monolithic project may waste £50bn and produce no cure because all funds were pushed down one (errroneous) route. Also, a monopoly project in a sense can't fail - no matter how crap it is, there's no-one for it to lose to.
So it varies from problem to problem. With something's (like mapping data in my linked) I'd argue a single approach is vastly more efficient because it's much more like a "treadmill" problem. With AIDS, it's better that there's multiple projects because afaik no-one knows what a final cure will look like or how we'll get there.
In terms of eliminating patents, obviously I'm all for this but clearly some thought needs to be given to how people are encouraged to invest in "boring" problems like analysing cell samples all day long and other stuff like that. People will happily contribute to Wikipedia because their tiny investment has immediate results and it's easy. If I was to spare a day editing Wikipedia I could probably contribute quite a lot of value (which we could evaluate as being "worth" £100). If I spent a day in a high tech biochem lab trying to "help" cure AIDS I'd contribute nothing of value. We have no way of breaking down certain problems into managable chunks (except in isolated examples like SETI with dubious worth anyway). In the longer term, I think better technology and more advanced concepts will mean that people will be able to help even in bewilderingly complex problems like curing AIDS or Cancer or whatever (and I don't mean just donating procesor cycles for protein modelling). When we get to that stage, patents will lose a lot of their utilitarian justification.
Before that, we'd need large government projects funded out of general taxation to make up for private projects (if we were to abolish patents I mean), which I am dubious of in the current political climate. At the moment, no-one cares if Pfizer spend £xbn making viagra. If it was the NHS Research Fund who did this there'd be loads of faggots complaining about how dare we waste money curing impotence when there's no cure for AIDS/cancer/being black yet (admittedly, they'd have a point, but it'd still be dull).
Of course, regardless which is most "efficient", I still oppose patents on ideological grounds. I'd prefer to have freedoms intact even if it meant never curing cancer (and yes, I have lost family members to cancer). Fortunately, it's not an either/or issue. We will cure these diseases because we are human beings and we
will prevail.