Private companies face a free rider problem in funding publicly available research, in that it's generally better to conserve one's capital and wait for someone

Private companies face a free rider problem in funding publicly available research, in that it's generally better to conserve one's capital and wait for someone else to pay for the research. And corporations, as a whole, are no where near as large as governments.. government has grown precipitously relative to the private sector over the last 80 years. It's just that that spending growth has been concentrated mostly in social programs rather goods and services that face the free rider problem: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...