Anmerkungen:
In: Economics Letters, Vol. 223, 2023
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments January 8, 2023 erstellt
Beschreibung:
In his seminal “Clio and the Economics of Qwerty”, Paul David indicates Thorstein Veblen’s famous discussion of the British system of coal rail haulage as an intellectual antecedent to the idea of lock in. This note documents how Albert G. Keller, a Yale sociologist contemporary of Veblen, had presented a similar argument in connection to the establishment of a brick tax in England and its effects on the size of bricks. Like Veblen, Keller used this illustration to emphasize the inertia exercised by certain institutional conditions