Excerpted from a speech by the Ecuadorian President, Rafael Correa, at Yale University:

“Having provided you with a quick overview of the importance we are attributing to human talent, science, knowledge and innovation in our administration, allow me to go back to the main idea I want to discuss this afternoon. The results obtained are no miracle; they are a consequence of our being able to change the correlation of forces in these areas in my country, on putting first the common good of the large majorities, and not the privileges of certain corporate groups.

Nonetheless, the political dispute is larger in scope. “He who has knowledge, has power,” noted the French philosopher Michel Foucault. As I mentioned earlier, the new cognitive capitalism created a neo dependency. Every day that Microsoft decides to launch a new version of Microsoft Office, the global South has no option other than to purchase its licenses or “copy without authorization.” The visible hand of the market schedules the obsolescence of its products and follows through with precision.

There will be no possible emancipation if we do not make a break with this new form of dependency. We seek to move from the economy of finite resources to the economy of infinite resources, which we have called the “social economy of knowledge and innovation.” This economy also seeks to recover the notion of knowledge as a public good.

Knowledge is generally a public good, that is, technically speaking, no one can be excluded from it, since we can all access that knowledge, and without any rivalry when it comes to consuming it, since my use of knowledge does not keep anyone else from using it. As George Bernard Shaw said: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

Trying to privatize a public good by means of institutional measures such as patents is harmful to society as a whole, because if there is no rivalry in consumption, then as the number of people who enjoy this good (already created) increases, the greater the social well-being. This is one of the famous “market failures.” One dramatic example of the privatization of knowledge and forced exclusion is the high cost of certain medicines, since they are patented.

The apparently pragmatic principle of the privatization of knowledge, in addition to its social inefficiency, usually subjugates human beings to capital.

The great challenge of humankind in the twenty-first century is to achieve the supremacy of human beings over capital; we need societies dominating markets, not societies dominated by markets. The market is a great servant, but a terrible master. We believe in society with markets, but not societies dominated by the market, in which lives, people, and society itself are just one more commodity, all in function of that entelechy called the market.

There are more efficient ways of incentivizing the production of knowledge. One alternative is greater participation by academia and by the public sector itself. Another alternative is for the State to compensate the creation of knowledge for profit, and in this way make it available to all humankind. The main problem with all these alternatives is that they tend to undermine ideological fundamentalisms and the rule of capital. But, let’s remember that the United States, for example, had a quasi-open system for knowledge management during its early periods of industrialization – they only recognized national patents and did not allow foreign companies to register patents.

While it is mainly the rich countries that produce science and technology, countries such as Ecuador produce environmental public goods; but in our case, for all the pure air generated by the Amazon jungle – the lungs of the planet without which human life would deteriorate critically – we the countries of the Amazon basin do not receive any compensation, while at the same time the biggest global polluters pay absolutely nothing to consume our environmental goods.

But there’s more. Nor do they want to recognize the information that exists in our biodiversity, which is often unique. One example is Epibatidine, a painkiller derived from our multicolor frog (Epipedobates tricolor), whose usefulness only became known thanks to the collective and ancestral knowledge of our peoples, and which was extracted by foreign scientists and exploited by international pharmaceutical companies, without any benefits at all for our country.

And it is sometimes thought that generating environmental goods has no cost. The reality is that it can be very costly, not in terms of direct costs, but in what economists call the “opportunity cost.” Today many demand – without any moral standing, I might add – that the oil of the Amazon be left underground. But that implies an immense cost in revenues not received, in every day that goes by with a child with no school, a community without drinking water, or people dying of preventable diseases, all of which are true pathologies of misery.

This is the new international division of labor. If before it was us producing raw materials and the hegemonic countries producing industrial goods with high value-added, now the new and unjust international division of labor is them generating knowledge that they privatize, and us environmental goods that continue to be global public goods.

And it is also a political problem, of power relations internationally.”