False Economy - Alan Beattie [133]
People have choices about the routes that they take. But this chapter seeks to show that having taken a particular path in the past—even for reasons that seemed sensible at the time—can make it harder to plump for the right option in the present day. And after a long time making the wrong choice, even making the right one now doesn't guarantee instant success.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is a recognition of the difficulties that attend making choices. To govern is to choose: yet those choices are inevitably conditioned on the decisions that others have made in the past. We have to forge policies using the institutions of government, law, politics, and culture that history and previous generations have bequeathed to us. We can seek to change them, but we cannot instantly wish new ones into being.
The idea that the routes open to us now depend on how we got here has a name: path dependence. Much of traditional economics resembles physics. It seeks to apply universal laws drawn from repeated observations. Path dependence more closely resembles evolutionary biology—the role played by a sequence of events, some of which may occur by chance. Hence the analogy with the panda.
Some of the most well-known, and perhaps easiest to grasp, examples of path dependence lie at the intersection of economic history and technology. One of them has played an extensive part in the preparation of this book: the standard QWERTY keyboard layout used in most of the Latin alphabet keyboards of the world. Remarkably enough, it is designed not to speed us up but to slow us down—namely, to stop us hitting two keys in quick succession.
The QWERTY layout dates from the development of the mechanical typewriter in the nineteenth century. Specifically, it appeared on the version invented by one Christopher Sholes and was perfected by engineers from Remington, the company to which he sold the design.
Since the typebars on that model were prone to jamming and hammering repeatedly on the same spot if they were hit in rapid succession, the keyboard deliberately placed many frequently used letter pairs in such configurations that it was hard to type them rapidly. One other design criterion was to collect all the letters of the word "typewriter" on the top row—an aid to salesmen keen to show off the new machine but without the patience to go beyond the hunt-and-peck school of typing.
Even at the time, faster keyboards were being developed for other mechanical typewriter models that put more of the heavily used keys on the same row. Subsequently other layouts, such as the Dvorak system, are widely held to be faster, and are certainly more comfortable, than the QWERTY layout. And yet QWERTY persists, thanks to the combined impact of so-called network effects and inertia. Network effects, which we encountered in the discussion about shipping containers, involve the increasing returns that are reaped when everyone uses the same system. It is evidently more efficient for all typists to use the same keyboard, since they only have to be trained once. And because the Remington design was dominant when the typing industry took off, that was the one adopted.
Having started down the QWERTY path for perfectly logical reasons, people continued along it even when it had long ceased to fulfill its original function. The amount of investment and organization it would have taken to leap onto a different path was prohibitive. What is striking about QWERTY is not that it continued to persist through the era of mechanical typewriters, used largely by professional typists with heavy investment in formal instruction, but that it endures today. This is an age of cheap, easily changeable computer keyboards on which most people teach themselves to type. The costs of changing are much