Having read The Value of Everything, I think she’s mainly concerned with companies that are profiting from government R&D (e.g. DARPA) while paying nothing in return (e.g. Google), both in terms of royalties or in offering their own research, which has foundations in the public domain, to the greater public. The socialism/risk and reward bit is more about making sure the government isn’t the only one to foot the bill for this kind of research, particularly if something goes wrong that has a significant impact on the larger economy (hello, venture capitalists).
She’s also, like Stiglitz, strongly in favor of increasing this type of research and quantifying it for a revised method of calculating GDP. If the focus is solely on the profits generated by these companies and not the underlying infrastructure that propped them up, economists will have a distorted picture of the economy and will continue to claim that the public sector contributes nothing and therefore should get no money for research. After all, these companies have it covered, right?
I don’t see her imposing royalties on parties that benefit from public sector research in a non-self-serving way. Even lawyers.
