Qwernomics¶
(Image source: Amy Ireland.)
Paul A. David provides the theoretical backstory, in his essay ‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’:
A path-dependent sequence of economic changes is one of which important influences upon the eventual outcome can be exerted by temporally remote events, including happenings dominated by chance elements rather than systematic forces. Stochastic processes like that do not converge automatically to a fixed-point distribution of outcomes, and are called non-ergodic. In such circumstances ‘historical accidents’ can neither be ignored, nor neatly quarantined for the purpose of economic analysis; the dynamic process itself takes on an essentially historical character. […] Touch typing gave rise to three features of the evolving production system which were crucially important in causing QWERTY to become ‘locked in’ as the dominant keyboard arrangement. These features were technical interrelatedness, economies of scale, and quasi-irreversibility of investment. They constitute the basic ingredients of what might be called QWERTYnomics.
The format of the Qwerty keyboard illustrates the production of a destiny. Even in the epoch succeeding the mechanical type-writer, and its specific design imperatives, the legacy layout of alphanumeric keys settled during the 1890s has remained frozen into place without significant revision. In the language of complex systems analysis, this is a special example of path-dependency, or irreducible historicity, characterized by irreversibility. Qwerty persists – arguably, as a suboptimal keyboard solution – due to identifiable ratchet-effects. Based upon this privileged model, the historical, technological, and economic process of ‘lock in’ through positive feedback is called QWERTY-nomics (and — going forward — simply ‘Qwernomics’).
There are a series of (now largely dormant) socio-political and policy controversies attending this model. For a counter-point to David’s analysis see the (excellent) Liebowitz and Margolis essay ‘The Fable of the Keys’ (1990), with comparatively-tolerable — if philosophically superficial — gloating from The Economist (here). The really crucial content of the complex systems analysis, however, remains unaffected by the vicissitudes of the controversy. Qwerty is a demonstrated (artificial) destiny, and thus a key to the nature of modernistic time.
The philosophically-serious critique of David’s construction dissolves the idea of any transcendent criterion for global optimality. (I’m not going to attempt to run that here yet.)
Qwerty is, beyond all plausible question, the supreme candidate for an articulate Capitalist Revelation. We haven’t begun to explore it with appropriate ardor up to this point.
ADDED: Course outline.