A Celebration of Left-Handed People

Those of you who, like me, are left-handed, probably know that having a dominant hand shared by only ten percent of the population frequently poses logistical problems. You may be relegated to the inside corner of a restaurant booth lest you elbow your friends or family members. You’ve probably been gifted a “left-handed” Allen wrench by someone with an inflated sense of their own jocularity. And if you want a place to rest your elbow while you’re furiously copying down lecture notes, you may have had to arrive early to your lecture hall to snag one of three left-handed desks before your fellow Southpaws do.

Many of these things are vestiges of a culture that forced right-handedness on people. But now that religious nonsense about left-handed people being of the devil has fallen by the wayside, the paltry accommodation of left-handed needs often is given a more frugal cast. While we’re no longer accused of being witches, we are often given the incredibly unhelpful advice of just learning to do regular tasks with our right hands.

But, thanks to capitalism we don’t have to. Lefties may never dominate most public spaces, but we are an identifiable market with well-defined needs that enterprising individuals have proved themselves happy to serve.

From left-handed notebooks and scissors to left-handed kitchen tools, it’s free markets that make it possible for niche markets, which may not have the biggest consumer base or promise the biggest profits, to exist. Capitalism alone creates a motive for entrepreneurs to search for unserved markets. And capitalism alone recognizes that value has two meanings: the hard monetary value of currency and the value the individual consumer brings to products that appeal to their unique wants and needs. 

A pair of right-handed scissors might be cheaper in value because they’re produced in greater bulk and have broader market appeal, but to me, a slightly more expensive pair of left-handed scissors is still more valuable, both because they better serves my needs and because someone has thought about that specific need and sought to fill it.

The proliferation of technology, itself also a product of free markets, has also improved life for left-handed people by enabling minority communities to create their own spaces and create resources others don’t see an incentive in producing.

I’m both a knitter and a crocheter, two crafts I was interested in but almost didn’t follow through on learning because it was endlessly frustrating to watch my family members and try to reverse engineer what they were doing. In the face of that frustration, I was told to just use my right hand.

But fortunately, there are YouTube tutorials that will show you how to do pretty much any knitting or crochet stitch you could possibly ever want to learn left-handed. And much more than that, name the hobby you’d like to do left-handed and you’ll have resources at your fingertips in the fraction of a second it takes to run a Google search. Many of these are put together by people with no incentive whatsoever beyond trying to help relieve the same frustration they and faceless strangers on the internet share.

As a leftie, I’ll never be able to use a chalkboard without dragging my hand through what I’ve just written. But thanks to technology and the free market, I am able to digitally write on a tablet that has a specific setting that recognizes the pressure my left wrist puts on the screen and disregards it. 

Life is undeniably better for left-handed people now and, yes, evolving social thought is behind some of that. But it’s free markets eager to serve minority markets in pursuit of a profit that are behind the rest of it.