Slow down, you're moving too fast: got to make the typing last....

You know how sometimes you discover that something you'd believed for ages turns out to be a myth? Well, today I discovered that the story of how the QWERTY keyboard was deliberately designed to slow down typists to prevent jams on old mechanical typewriters, and was still around today only because of apathy, is just such a heap of tosh.

Here is a good article from The Economist on a number of "myths of market failure", such as lighthouses, beekeeping and QWERTY. (It's not just of interest to lighthouse-keepers with bees stuck in their manual typewriters.)