Letters

From the November 1996 issue

Typing Tangles

Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis should be applauded for their discussion of QWERTY (" Typing Errors ," June). They are right that QWERTY does not strengthen an argument for government intervention. However, QWERTY raises philosophical issues that can't be resolved simply by retelling the history of this (or any) particular innovation. QWERTY is best understood as an argument against a strand of economic thinking which comes very close to making the Panglossian argument that markets lead us to "the best of all possible worlds." To say that keyboard technology is as efficient as it could possibly be at this point in history is tautological and meaningless. Economics by itself simply doesn't have much to offer to the conversations that take place at this level. It might be that conversations at that level are themselves meaningless, but saying this requires a philosophical reach outside of economics.

This is relevant on a political level, because classical liberals who rely too heavily on economics for their thinking often end up making Panglossian arguments. If they wish to be persuasive, classical liberals must have something to say about human beings as human beings and not simply as rational utility-maximizers.

Daniel Forbes
New York, NY

I found Liebowitz and Margolis's article in-triguing. It does indeed seem unfortunate that so many scholars and writers are locked in to the clearly inferior example of the QWERTY keyboard and seem so utterly dependent upon the erroneous path laid before them by, for one, Dvorak.

In light of that little irony, perhaps Liebowitz and Margolis should refine their argument to say that, though the market can at times lead to the adoption of very goofy, bad, or inefficient networks, such poor decisions can be overcome by smart entrepreneurs, though the rejection of a bad network and the adoption of a good network is not a foregone conclusion. They might add that government is less likely than free entrepreneurs to adopt the best networks.

I was disappointed to not find a discussion by Liebowitz and Margolis about the free- rider problem associated with network externalities. If a different keyboard design really were more efficient than the one I'm now using, it would be much more expensive for the first firms to switch over to the new design than later firms; firms would be tempted to free- ride on the efforts of the first firms to switch. Of course, libertarians view problems of externalities as problems to be solved by entrepreneurs, not the state.

Ari Armstrong
Arvada, CO

Liebowitz and Margolis's article is as flawed as the QWERTY keyboard. I would suggest that they get out from under their papers, books, and research studies to try a Dvorak keyboard to get at the truth. In the studies they cite, where two groups competed against each other on the two machines, they failed to observe that the participants previously all had been QWERTY typists. This leads to an obvious disadvantage for the Dvorak groups, who had to overcome their QWERTY habits while attempting to adapt to the new keyboard layout. The only acceptable study would be one in which all the participants had never typed before. The result would be quite clear: The Dvorak is far superior.

James Argiro
Deerfield Beach, FL

Since the gist of their article is attacking the erroneous repetition of untested myths, it's ironic that Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis perpetuate the fallacy that the Macintosh's graphical interface was taken from Xerox. The idea of a graphical interface dates back, at least, to Jef Raskin's Ph.D. thesis, "A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System." Curiously, Raskin was the project leader for the Macintosh, the Mac's graphics engine is called QuickDraw, and the Mac project started long before Steve Jobs's mythological visit to Xerox PARC.

Quoting from a recent message to the "MacWay" mailing list by Bruce Horn (an engineer who joined the Macintosh project in 1981 after eight years at Xerox): "I've been watching the debate for more than a decade now about where the Macintosh User Interface came from. Most people assume that it was taken directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs went to visit. This 'fact' is reported over and over, by people who don't know any better (and also by people who should!). This just isn't true--there are some similarities between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differences are substantial."

Richard B. "Brad" Hutchings

While I agree that Dvorak's slow acceptance may not be a good example of why markets can't be trusted, Liebowitz and Margolis first slander Typewriting Behavior, the 1936 book by Dvorak et al. presenting the keyboard's design, as "a late-night television infomercial rather than scientific work." The 500-plus page book stuffed with charts and design details is, in the preface, clearly identified as part of "a series of commercial education [books] to result from" their studies, for which they gratefully acknowledge funding from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (not the "Carnegie Commission"). Liebowitz and Margolis claim that they "discovered" this support, as if it were somehow hidden from public view. Hidden in the preface of the book?

They claim the 1944 Navy study was difficult to find, and the author's names were concealed. My publisher has had copies of the report available for 15 years. It clearly shows it was "Prepared by Training Section, Departmental Services Division of Shore Establishments and Civilian Personnel, Washington, D.C."--not an atypical attribution for a government study.