The economics of QWERTY

First in a series of editorial "retrospectives" – published back when I was recovering from that tsunami I talked about over here.

When you get to work this morning, sitting down at your desk to a burnt cup of office coffee and your morning email, I ask you to contemplate that fixture of working life: the QWERTY keyboard.

Have you ever wondered how the keyboard got the way it did? I have. I've experimented recently with different key arrangements on my own board, a trivial thing to do in Microsoft Windows. As a chronic tendinitis sufferer, I have an incentive to try less fatigue-inducing alternatives to QWERTY, even if my words-per-minute get handicapped in the process. One promising arrangement I found is called "Dvorák". It purports to be laid out on strictly ergonomic principles, placing the most frequently used keys in the most prominent positions. Despite this I am finding little relief so far. Typing, no matter how I slice it, just plain hurts.

Investigating further, I found to my surprise that controversy has swirled for years among economists over whether Dvorák or QWERTY are superior, and how QWERTY gained its market dominance. The lowly keyboard, it turns out, more than just an overlooked symbol of life in our networked world, is Exhibit A in the case against free-market capitalism.

The typewriter was invented in 1868 and, so the story goes, the now-familiar QWERTY keyboard was selected precisely because it prevented fast typing, which jammed the keys. Though it may have been the right design for the time, QWERTY critics say, we've all been suffering its inefficiencies since, and a mass conversion to Dvorák should be undertaken forthwith by the computer industry. More tellingly, these critics say that government is needed to force that conversion on us.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. Mainstream economists like the liberal-left Paul Krugman discuss the so-called "Economics of QWERTY". This is the familiar story of BETA vs. VHS, Mac vs. PC, and Hybrid vs. SUV. To Krugman, the undeserved market success of technologies like the QWERTY keyboard is due not to superiority or low cost, but to early" lock-in". These technologies simply beat their competitors to the punch, and market inertia keeps them dominant – and keeps all of us dim-witted consumers from switching en masse, even though we all know individually we'd be better off doing so.

This is all garbage, of course. Products dominate a market if – and only as long as – they serve consumers' needs. The QWERTY keyboard remains dominant because, as I discovered first-hand, Dvorák is no better. If it were, consumers would clamor for the new keyboards, and savvy entrepreneurs would provide them.

The true lesson to be learned here is that anti-capitalists always underestimate the intelligence and autonomy of individual consumers and entrepreneurs acting without help or guidance from Big Brother government. To them, we are all helpless in the face of a cruel and capricious free market that rewards not innovation, but timing and luck. They couldn't be more wrong. I prove it every day I sit down at my computer to type.