"Conventional thinking passes on the notion of ideal states, static equilibrium systems, and linear dynamics and continuous functions as if everything worth knowing about science had been discovered. The implication is that if students learn this catechism, then real cases can be addressed by approximation to the ideal. The fact is, of course, that physical systems are real, not ideal, and many of the most interesting systems are discontinuous rather than continuous, nonlinear, rather than linear, and dynamic as well as static. In addition, the maxim that reality is only a mild departure from the ideal isn't the case. As best-selling author James Gleick said, Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.' The great discoveries of the past should be accorded their well-earned due, but it is time to move on to what has been characterized as the science of the 21st century." [Hutchison, 70]

Economists became interested in chaos theory when Benoit Mandlebrot, a French mathematician, applied fractal analysis to seemingly random, historical cotton prices and found clear evidence of similar patterns in daily, weekly, and monthly cotton price changes. Subsequently this analysis was applied to exchange rates and other economic events. In Chaos and Order in Capital Markets, Edgar Peters contends that chaos theory is a far superior framework for examining the stock and bond markets than the efficient markets hypothesis. Some, however, take issue with Peters.

"Many have now concluded that formal chaos theory has nothing practical to offer. As Ron Liesching, head of research at Pareto Partners, a quantitative fund-management firm, jokes: The best way to make money out of deterministic chaos is to write about it.' Other American fund-management firms, such as Renaissance and the Prediction Company, which enthusiastically embraced chaos in the 1980s, have mostly abandoned it in favor of other techniques." [Anonymous, "Finance," 69]

Arthur and other social scientists were recruited by the Santa Fe Institute because complexity research quickly spread from the natural to the social sciences. The methods of computer science are appropriate for the social sciences because they are concerned with the world of information and intellectual processes that are not directly governed by physical laws.

Of particular interest to economists was the work of mathematician John Holland. In seeking a way to model the human brain, he learned that efforts at MIT to create a "command-and-control" model had failed. "So he solved the problem by making each digital 'synapse' into an economic unit. Individual synapses were paid off for solving problems, with a 'bucket brigade' to distribute the rewards to participating units." [Tucker, 37] Thus did complexity theorists confirm that Adam Smith was right. The profit motive is an enormously powerful organizing force.

In 1988, computer experts at the Palo Alto Research Center also discovered this principle when Xerox tried setting up a system to maximize the use of its computers. "Engineers had tried a 'command-and-control' system, but found it unworkable. The information needed to coordinate decisions quickly overwhelmed the central processor. So Xerox researchers invented SPAWN, a system in which individual computers are given 'money' and instructed to maximize their bank accounts by taking on tasks and trading computer downtime among themselves. Without any external direction or control, the computers quickly optimize their own use by trading on this internally created market." [Tucker, 37]

The spontaneous order that the interdisciplinary team at the Santa Fe Institute demonstrated mathematically validated the work of Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek. In his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek coined the term "spontaneous order" to describe a market economy left to itself, because he believed that it will "...spontaneously optimize the wishes and desires of its participants--even though all are only pursuing their own self-interest." [Tucker, 37]

"Right after we published our first findings," Arthur recalls, "we started getting letters from all over the country saying, 'You know, all you guys have done is rediscover Austrian economics....I admit I wasn't familiar with Hayek and von Mises at the time. But now that I've read them, I can see that this is essentially true." [Tucker, 38]

Although the Santa Fe Institute's computer-assisted discovery of spontaneous order appears to vindicate the Austrian School of Economics' faith in free markets, Arthur, nonetheless, advocates government intervention in the marketplace. This is because he believes that, markets sometimes lock in an inferior technology, such as the VHS, and he thinks the government should intervene to prevent this. Neoclassical theory, he falsely claims "...would have us believe that a free market will always winnow out the best and most efficient technologies." [Waldrop, 34])

Because Ludwig von Mises was the most prominent of the few economists who claimed that socialist economies would collapse because they cannot rationally allocate resources, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the introduction of market-based economic reforms in China has raised this school of economic thought from an obscurity so great that formerly a great many economists had never heard of, and the few who had usually knew very little about it. The awarding of the Nobel prize in economics several years ago to an Austrian, the now deceased Friedrich von Hayek, also added greatly to Austrian economics' stature. Hayek was the author of many thoughtful books, one of which, The Road to Serfdom, marked the revival of classical liberalism and gained a substantial non-academic audience. (It was condensed by Readers' Digest and featured by the Book of the Month Club.) In it, he warned that Great Britain was making a terrible mistake by turning to socialism after World War Two.

That mathematics would be used to prove von Mises right is ironic in light of his views regarding mathematical economics:

"The mathematical economists...formulate equations and draw curves which are supposed to describe reality. In fact they describe only a hypothetical and unrealizable state of affairs, in no way similar to the catallactic problems in question. They substitute algebraic symbols for the determinate terms of money as used in economic calculation and believe that this procedure renders their reasoning more scientific....

In the imaginary construction of the evenly rotating economy all factors of production are employed in such a way that each of them renders the most valuable service....It is, of course, possible to describe this imaginary state of the allocation of resources in differential equations and to visualize it graphically in curves. But such devices do not assert anything about the market process. They merely mark out an imaginary situation in which the market process would cease to operate....

Both the logical and the mathematical economists assert that human action ultimately aims at the establishment of such a state of equilibrium and would reach it if all further changes in data were to cease. But the logical economist knows much more than that. He shows how the activities of enterprising men, the promoters and speculators, eager to profit from discrepancies in the price structure, tend toward eradicating such discrepancies and thereby also toward blotting out the sources of entrepreneurial profit and loss....The mathematical description of various states of equilibrium is mere play. The problem is the analysis of the market process....

The problem of process analysis, i.e., the only economic problems that matter, defy any mathematical approach."[von Mises, Human Action, 353-536]

During von Mises' lifetime, of course, mathematicians lacked the ability to deal with a system without an equilibrium. In his day, mathematical economists worked with what is called Walrasian general equilibrium. This is a system of linear equations which model a changeless economy characterized by perfect knowledge. This model, contended von Mises and his fellow Austrian economists, has no relevance in the real world, which is characterized by uncertainty, continuing change, and scattered knowledge.

If complexity theory is capable of doing what its proponents claim, today it is possible to mathematically model reality as the Austrians describe it.

Considered by mainstream economists to be radical, methodological outcasts, the Austrians, who claim, politically, to be Jeffersonians, had no opportunity to have any influence within the Washington beltway until Ronald Reagan became president. President Reagan's attitude towards Austrian economics was friendly because of its similarity to Reaganomics. Austrian economics also has much in common with the economic philosophy of Libertarians.

"What atoms are to physics, individuals are to Austrian economics. Unlike atoms governed by natural law, individuals use their will and powers of reason to guide their brute physical behavior toward their own ends and goals. The Keynesian-neoclassical orthodoxy is 'economics betrayed,' or indeed 'human action betrayed,' in that Keynesians focus, not on individual will and reason, but on forces beyond the individual's control....Keynesians ignore individual choice.

Like the Keynesians, the neoclassicals have displaced the real agent of economic (and all other) activity--the individual will. Where there is will, according to the neo-Austrians, there are ways; where will does not exist, there is only sterile neoclassical equilibrium." [Canterbery, 261] "The radicalness of Austrianism stems from the role of the consumer as the ultimate arbiter of value combined with the entrepreneur's role as the sole creator of value." [Canterbery, 264]

Although, like the Austrians, Neoclassical economists believe in a limited state, the constitutional order Austrians desire is not considered by them to be a necessity. The Austrians want a Lockian-style social contract which will maximize individual freedom. Spearheading the propagation of Austrian economic theory is the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Named for the founder of Austrian economics in the United States, this institute is located at Auburn University. The principles of Austrian economics are also promoted by the Mount Pelerin Society.

It was the Mount Perelin Society which caused Nobel-prize-winning Monetarist economist Milton Friedman to begin writing about policy, as it was at a Mount Perelin Society meeting, says Friedman, "...that I first came into contact with people like Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and the European contingent of that time. That widened my perspective about issues and policy." [Doherty, 34]

If taken seriously, neoclassical theory means that history--empirical studies of such things as the history of technology and industries--is irrelevant, because an economy in perfect equilibrium exists outside history. [Waldrop, 50] This explains why so many colleges and universities have dropped their courses in economic history, which he thinks this is a mistake because, like biological ecosystems, the economy undergoes "bursts of evolutionary creativity and massive extinction events." [Waldrop, 119]

Arthur is intrigued by how new technology like "...the automobile comes in and replaces an older technology, the horse. Along with the horse go the smithy, the pony express, the watering troughs, the stables, the people who curried horses, and so on. The whole subnetwork of technologies that depended upon the horse suddenly collapses in what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter once called 'a gale of destruction.' But along with the car came paved roads, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, motels, traffic courts and traffic cops, and traffic lights. A whole new network of goods and services begins to grow, each one filling a niche opened up by the goods and services that came before it. [Waldrop, 119] Arthur considers this process to be an example of increasing returns.

...Complex adaptive systems typically have many niches," he observes, "each one of which can be exploited by an agent adapted to fill that niche. Thus, the economic world has a place for computer programmers, plumbers, steel mills, and pet stores, just as the rain forest has a place for tree sloths and butterflies. Moreover, the very act of tilling one niche opens up more niches--for new parasites, for new predators and prey, for new symbiotic partners. So new opportunities are always being created by the system. And that, in turn, means that it's essentially meaningless to talk about a complex adaptive system being in equilibrium: the system can never get there."[Waldrop, 147]

The construction of paved roads is an example of a backward linkage of the automobile industry, while the construction of motels is an example of a forward linkage. Other linkages, such as a trained workforce established by an existing firm attracting competing firms to an area, have also been remarked upon.

Arthur believes that many consumer choices are random events which become locked in due to economies of scale, which in high technology industries may be very substantial. The cost of running a computer network, for example, rises very little when a customer is added. Consumers' initial choices of which network to join is random. Since a customer benefits more from joining a larger network than a smaller one, claims Arthur, the largest network will eventually become a monopoly even though, technologically, it may be inferior to one of the other, unlucky, networks. Therefore, society has taken an inferior path, and producers are enjoying unjustifiably high profits. Arthur's solution is for the government to make these choices. This line of reasoning has been rather effectively countered by Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas and Stephen E. Margolis of North Carolina State University.

Socialist economists lack the knowledge, claim the Austrians, of consumer preferences necessary in order to provide a rational answer to questions like whether, say, additional wire is the best use of the existing stock of copper. In a market economy, on the other hand, where prices are determined by supply and demand, if the public does not value very highly additional copper wire, then the price that copper wire can be sold for will not cover the cost of producing it, because the higher demand for other copper products will cause the price of copper to be too high to make it profitable to use it for wire.

"How might a definite plot of city land be used most advantageously--as a wheat field, a parking lot, a site for a swimming pool or hotel or office or apartment building, or what? By the logic of the price system, this resource goes under the control of whoever will pay the most. In bidding for its use, business firms estimate how much it can contribute, however indirectly, to producing goods and services that consumers want and will pay for. How much value it can contribute depends not only on physical facts of production but also on the selling price of each of the possible final products, and this price depends in turn partly on opportunities to produce the product in other ways. Wheat grown on cheaper land elsewhere would keep anyone who wanted to use city land to grow wheat from affording to bid highest for it. Not only natural resources but also capital, labor and entrepreneurial ability thus move into lines of production where they contribute most to satisfying consumer needs and wants, satisfactions being measured by what consumers will pay for them." [Yeager, 95]

In a communist nation, in order to placate consumers and farmers, the government may set a price so low for bread and so high for wheat that it is cheaper to feed animals bread, rather than wheat. [This has actually happened.] As a result, much of the effort of bakers is wasted and, the public, therefore, is less well off than it could be. Even if a communist government wants to set prices on an economic, rather than a political basis, it is impossible for it to do so, because in the absence of free markets, there is no way to determine the public's relative valuations of either the various goods and services which can be produced or of the resources needed to produce them.

In the socialist economy the only way to measure efficiency is on a quantitative (engineering) basis. Because, per pound, coal is a more efficient producer of heat than wood, on an engineering basis, it is the superior fuel. Yet, so long as there was plenty of wood located near railroad tracks and river banks in this country, it was cheaper, and, therefore, better for society, for trains and steamboats to use wood, because coal had to be mined via underground shafts dug through narrow seams of coal and transported over vastly longer distances to the places where it would be used.

By supposedly achieving efficiency through reducing waste by maximizing the ratio of the weight of output to the weight of inputs, in the Soviet Union they produced chandeliers so heavy no ceiling could support them! Reducing waste by using as much of a bolt of cloth as was possible resulted in clothes so unattractive people would not buy them. Unsold merchandise piled up because under central planning retailers lacked both any incentive or the authority to lower price until it could be sold. Assigned certain suppliers by central planners, retailers lacked the leverage necessary to force their suppliers to provide salable merchandise.

Austrians differ significantly from Neoclassicals in regard to the appropriate use of quantification in economics in part because, while the Neoclassical economists are willing to lump everybody consuming, say, automobiles together, the Austrians are not. This is because people often have different motives for buying the same product.

"Austrian economists...view the world as an emerging and constantly evolving process by which people act and react in pursuit of their individually established interests." [McKenzie, 5] Austrians believe that mathematics is useful only in understanding patterns, while Neoclassical economists believe in using mathematics to make predictions. This is because Austrians view markets as "...a spontaneous order that emerges as people, attempting to pursue their own interest, adjust and readjust their own actions to the actions of others. Because of the learning that occurs as people interact with one another, complex reality is never quite the same and cannot, therefore, be predicted on the basis of past regularities.....To [Milton] Friedman and other neoclassicals, a theory is merely a convenient fiction, a rule of thumb, which is capable of generating predictions that are more often correct than are generated by other convenient fictions." [McKenzie, 7]

Like those normally classified as Neoclassical economists, Friedman, who is normally classified as a Monetarist economist, believes that it is O.K. to assume people are rational and markets are perfectly competitive even if this is not true, if these assumptions result in correct predictions. Austrians believe assumptions must be realistic, and they will only predict a pattern or range of outcomes.

Both the Monetarists and the Austrians have strong, non-mainstream views on money. The Austrians' views are much further from the mainstream than the Monetarists'. The Austrians wish to abolish the Federal Reserve System (Fed) and fractional reserve banking and return to the gold standard. Until and unless this is done, they say, inflation will continue to be a problem. Monetarists, on the other hand, simply want the increase the money supply by a fixed percent annually adequate to accommodate the growth of output, i.e., prevent the growth of output from forcing down the price level. Unlike the Monetarists, the Austrians are concerned over the redistribution of income brought about by excessive money creation. Income is redistributed because the initial recipients of new money spend it before it causes prices to rise.

A proponent of a modern version of the quantity theory of money, his most important academic work is Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, which was co-authored by Anna Schwartz. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Friedman was Senator Barry Goldwater's chief economic advisor.

Friedman is concerned by the fact that many of the economists whose views the public hears are employed by people whose objective is to promote certain economic policies and theories. These economists' views should be as critically examined as you would what a defense lawyer or expert witness says in court A good example of why you should be skeptical took place recently when an economist employed by President Clinton signed a newspaper advertisement which claimed that an increase in the minimum wage would not cost jobs. Yet, in a textbook published in 1993, he wrote: "How much unemployment does the minimum wage create? That depends on the level at which the minimum wage is set and on the elasticity of demand and supply for labor." [Stiglitz, 131]

Friedman advises young economists to make policy issues an avocation, rather than a vocation. "Get a job," he advises. "Get a secure base of income. Otherwise, you're going to get corrupted and destroyed. How are you going to get support? You're only going to get support from people who are ideologically motivated. And you're not going to be as free as you think you're going to be.

One of the most important things in my career," he says, "is that I always had a major vocation which was not policy....By having a good firm position in the academic world, I was perfectly free to be my own person in the world of policy." [Doherty, 34]

• (1) Use mathematics as a short-hand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry.

• (2) Keep to them till you have done.

• (3) Translate into English.

• (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.

• (5) Burn the mathematics.

• (6) If you can't succeed in (4), burn (3). This last I did often."

  [Henderson, 63]

The analogy of an invisible hand guiding producers is used to describe how a market system works: the interaction of suppliers seeking to maximize their profits and consumers seeking to maximize their utility (benefits from consumption) "guides" them to a socially optimal solution to the economic problem: what to produce, how to produce it, and who will consume it, because profits are maximized by producing what consumers most want in the most efficient (least resource using) manner.

Smith advocated laissez faire, that is, an economic system characterized a minimum of government control of the economy. Smith's objective in writing The Wealth of Nations was to point out the superiority of laissez faire to the then dominant economic philosophy of mercantilism. Karl Marx's objective in writing a later book, Das Kapital, was to demonstrate the superiority of communism to laissez faire. The free market system Smith advocated requires the private property that Marx abhorred, viewing it as the cause of as the exploitation of the many by the few. Rather than an invisible hand, Marx's ideal economic system is guided by a very visible hand of government.

The Austrians are not the only school of economic thought which scorns the equilibrium analysis:

Institutionalist and Austrian economists have long been interested in institutions. This interest is now being shared by a growing number of neoclassical economists who recognize the inherent limitations in the equilibrium method of analysis--specifically, its lack of context. As expected, neoclassical economists are more likely to follow the Austrian approach to institutions since they already share much with the Austrians...The Austrians view institutions only as effects--as the results of individual actions. Institutionalists view institutions as both cause and effect, as socializing devices, and as the expression and result of individual actions." [Clark, 373]

According to Schumpeter, successful entrepreneurs would finance educations for their children which would turn them into intellectuals scornful of their parents and opposed to capitalism because capitalism does not provide them with the power and rewards they believe they deserve. Therefore, they would bring capitalism down; hoping to establish themselves as socialist planners who will right all the injustices they see in capitalist society.

An atypical, recent application of marginal analysis which is supportive of those who advocate reducing the size of government was reported on in the 6 April 1996 issue of The Economist. In an International Monetary Fund (IMF) paper, V. Tanzi and L. Schuknecht concluded that, while before 1960 additional government spending was associated with considerable improvements in social welfare, subsequent increases in total government spending have provided only modest social gains, and those countries where spending has risen the most, have done no better in either social or economic terms than have those at the other end of the spectrum.

Keynes believed that modern, not very competitive capitalism is so unstable that it will ultimately collapse as a result of the hardship imposed on the public by periodic depressions. Unlike Marx, he did not welcome this; so he advocated it be avoided by the government preventing the level of aggregate spending from falling by running deficits, that is, through borrowing, the government spending more than it collects through taxation.

The origins of today's state capitalism, claim the Austrians, trace back to the reforms of the Progressive Era. These reforms were "...pushed through by big business interests, such as J. P. Morgan and his heirs, who 'realized that monopoly privilege can be created only by the State and not as a result of free-market operations.' Big business hailed [President Woodrow] Wilson's war collectivism, and welcomed the Interstate Commerce Commission [ICC], the Federal Trade Commission [FTC], the Federal Reserve and agricultural subsidies with open arms. They didn't want free competition in free markets, but privileges doled out by an all-powerful state, in which hierarchy and monopoly would stifle all challenges to their dominance. These were the real roots of the problem, a web of controls and government-business 'partnership' that would blossom into the New Deal." [Raimondo, 210-211]

In the Progressive period, both Democrats and Republicans thought big government and national planning were needed. It is not surprising that before Herbert Hoover became president, Franklin D. Roosevelt thought he would make a good president because, as a Cabinet member overseeing the new radio industry, Hoover played a role in establishing a company, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), that was supposed to monopolize international radio communications in the Western Hemisphere; this being made possible through an agreement with Great Britain and Germany, who were allocated the rest of the world. (Effective domestic competition for RCA was eliminated when the government forced the British Marconi Company to sell its American assets to the new American company (RCA), whose board of directors initially included a government representative.)

According to Austrian economist Murray A. Rothbard:

"The Progressive Era was essentially put through by the Morgans and their allies in order to cartelize American business and industry, to take up more effectively where the cartel and merger movements had left off. It should be clear that the Federal Reserve System, established in 1913, was part and parcel of that Progressive movement; just as the large meat packers managed to put through costly federal inspection of meat in 1906, in order to place crippling, high costs on competing small meat packers, so the big bankers cartelized banking through the Federal Reserve System seven years later. [Rothbard, 86]. ...Since the importance of political parties dwindled after 1900, and ideological laissez-faire restraints on government intervention were gravely weakened, the power of financiers in government increased markedly. Furthermore, Congress--the arena of political parties--became less important. A power vacuum developed for the intellectuals and technocratic experts to fill the executive bureaucracy, and to run and plan national economic life relatively unchecked." [Rothbard, 91]

David Ricardo (1771-1823) developed a theory of comparative cost included in all introductory economics textbooks which demonstrates that, due to differences from place to place in where comparative advantage lies, each type of industry will not be evenly distributed across the landscape. His theory of comparative advantage explains why, for example, in the nineteenth century the Southern States grew cotton, the great majority of which was made into thread and cloth in England and New England. It explains, too, the subsequent, westward shift of cotton cultivation and the shift of the cotton textile industry, first to the South, and then abroad.

Ricardo demonstrated that individuals and firms and regions and nations will be better off if they specialize in what they have a comparative advantage in. In Ricardo's well known example, he advised England to produce cloth and Portugal wine, because the former had a comparative advantage in cloth; while the former had a comparative advantage in wine. Because specialization will increase productivity in both nations, both could consume more of these products if they thus specialized in the one they had a comparative advantage in and traded it for the other one. Mainstream economists' view is that free trade will force people to specialize on the basis of comparative advantage.

Early in this century the work of Ohlin suggested that increases in market size increases the geographic concentration of economic activity because, with increased size, there is more to be gained by a fuller exploitation of economies of scale through a higher concentration of economic activity than is lost due to resulting higher transportation costs.

Economies of scale refers to the fact that up to some point, increasing a productive facility's size will reduce average cost per unit. That is, while a small-scale plant will produce a relatively low level of output at a the lowest cost per unit possible, a larger-scale plant will produce a greater level of output at an even lower cost per unit. Economies of scale differ from economies to scale, which refers to the fact that the average cost per unit of output produced in a given facility varies. Up to the level of output the facility was designed to produce with maximum efficiency, cost per unit declines (increasing returns). Thereafter, it rises (diminishing returns).

Examples cited by Arthur make it clear engineering criteria determines which technology he considers to be the best. The QWERTY keyboard is inferior, he says, because it was designed to slow typists down because early typewriters would jam if a typist was too fast. [Waldrop, 35] (It may be more correct to say that the letters which the striking of the keys caused to strike a ribbon and print themselves on a sheet of paper were rearranged--putting certain of them on the opposite side of the "basket" in which they located on a manual typewriter--so that fast typists would not jam them.) "...The VHS videotape format," he observes, "was well on its way to cornering the market, despite the fact that many experts had originally rated it slightly inferior to Beta technologically." [Waldrop, 35, 36]

How is the government to decide when to intervene because an inferior technology has been locked-in? Certainly, for example, government action is not called for because the market has locked in inferior--because they are less accurate--non-atomic clocks.

Is there any justification for believing government direction of technological change is any better than market direction? The Japanese government sank a huge amount of public funds in developing analog HDTV. This was a mistake, because HDTV is going to be digital.

Something government cannot do, but markets can, is weigh the relative valuations consumers place on the various features of different technologies. Would people rather have a very high quality picture, or would they prefer a good, but lesser quality picture and far more programs to choose between? (An analog TV signal takes up far more bandwidth than does a digital signal.)

Mainstream economic theory in the United States has always assumed that consumers make economically rational choices. Therefore, it has never been asserted that consumers will always choose the product with the highest engineering efficiency. Computer A, for example, may be faster than computer B, but since the consumer's objective in buying a computer is to get certain jobs done, the lack of the software needed to do these jobs which can be run on computer A makes its speed advantage meaningless.

Is VHS any more locked in than were eight-track tapes, which disappeared within only a few years? Are there really costs imposed on society by random consumer choices which lock us into inferior technologies great enough to justify establishing a government technology vetting bureaucracy? Some powerfully question this. very powerfully question this. Neither QWERTY or VHS are, as Arthur claims, say two critics examples of the locking in of inferior technologies.

Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis have tracked down the Navy study of the QWERTY keyboard which Arthur and others sharing his views heavily rely upon--apparently without having seen it--as proof that the QWERTY keyboard is inferior to the Dvorak keyboard. The Navy study, which was done by the man who designed the Dvorak keyboard (!), was conducted in a non-scientific manner in a Dvorak-favoring way. Several other studies of these keyboards that appear to have been conducted in a more scientific manner by unbiased researchers came up with very different results.

Liebowitz and Margolis observe that "theories of path dependence and their supporting mythology have begun to exert an influence on policy. Last summer, an amicus brief on the Microsoft consent decree used lock-in arguments, including the QWERTY story, and apparently prompted Judge Stanley Sporkin to refuse to ratify the decree. (He was later overturned.) [Liebowitz and Margolis, "Typing Errors," 31]

said that, "...a large majority of the railroads in the Unites States would be delighted if a railroad commission or any other power could make rates upon their traffic which would insure them six per cent dividends, and I have no doubt, with such a guarantee, they would be very glad to come under the direct supervision and operation of the National government." [Gordon, 24] "Even when the law was much strengthened in the Theodore Roosevelt administration and the ICC given the power to set rates, the railroads quickly learned how to manipulate it in their own interests, just as they had the old state commissions." [Gordon, 24]

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