The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

by Mariana Mazzucato

The internal combustion engine has retained its dominance for over a hundred years, not because it is the best possible engine, but because through historical accident it gained an initial advantage. Subsequent innovations did not seek to supplant it, but clustered around improvements to it, so that it became post factum the best engine.61 The same goes for the QWERTY keyboard layout, named for the first six letters on the top from left to right. In the days of mechanical typewriters, the very inefficiency of this keyboard layout gave it an advantage over alternatives such as the faster DVORAK layout because the mechanical keys would jam less frequently. The mechanical necessity for the QWERTY layout has long passed in these days of electronic keyboards, but its advantage has remained. Once people learned how to type using the QWERTY layout they resisted change. This social inertia meant its arbitrary initial advantage got locked in.