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."
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.
Liebowitz and Margolis's coup de grace, though, is the General Services Administration's 1956 study by Earl Strong. They conclude that because there has been "no attempt to discredit the GSA study," academics and journalists are not living up to their high standards when writing about the Dvorak. Liebowitz and Margolis didn't do their homework: Dvorak supporters would simply say, "been there, done that." Example: My 1986 book, which Liebowitz and Margolis could probably have found in their university libraries, spent several pages pointing out gross bias behind the GSA study. Harvard's Richard Land said the GSA test was "poorly designed," that "the conclusions are overstated," and that the data actually showed "great promise" for further improvement by the Dvorak typists which Strong ignored. When other researchers wanted to see the raw data so they could draw their own conclusions, they found that Strong had destroyed it all! This is an example of the high standards Liebowitz and Margolis aspire to? Further, Strong was clearly biased: In 1949, he wrote, "I am out to exploit [the present keyboard] to its very utmost in opposition to the change to new keyboards," and there is evidence of a personal animosity between Strong and Dvorak.
I agree with Liebowitz and Margolis on another thing: There is a need for good, unbiased studies on Dvorak. The best raw data I have access to at present is from Keytime, a Seattle-based company which uses keyboard instructional technologies they developed in house. In the past nine years, they have trained several hundred typists on Dvorak and several thousand on QWERTY, using the exact same equipment and teaching methodologies. They have "repeatedly found" that after 15 hours of training and practice time, existing QWERTY hunt-and-peck typists can touch type at an average 20 words per minute. After 15 hours of training and practice on Dvorak, similarly able (QWERTY) typists consistently average 25 to 30 words per minute touch-typing on Dvorak. Further, Keytime reports that the Dvorak typists continue to improve at a higher rate. Liebowitz and Margolis conclude that "the story of Dvorak's superiority is a myth or, perhaps more properly, a hoax." Concluding that there is some sort of conspiracy afoot among the obviously grassroots 60-year support for the Dvorak is paranoia, not academic theory.
Randy Cassingham
Boulder, CO
Messrs. Liebowitz and Margolis reply: Regarding Mr. Forbes's point, it has never been our position that the QWERTY keyboard was the best of all possible keyboards. Further, economics does not generally make such claims. We would argue, however, that economics does demonstrate that competition leads to the least-cost methods of achieving a particular goal. A Toyota Corolla might not be the best car that can be imagined, or even produced, but for the money, it does its job about as well as anything that we can currently produce. Otherwise some smart entrepreneur would put those inefficient auto companies out of business. It is not Panglossian to say that competition leads to efficiency, since efficiency is not sufficient to achieve the best of all possible worlds. We are perfectly willing to acknowledge this limitation of economics. To Mr. Argiro we would note that the mathematical simulations of typing, which show no advantage for Dvorak, do not have the drawback that he cites. Also, Dvorak did claim that QWERTY typists would also benefit from his technique. His own Navy study compared retrained QWERTY typists, appropriately mimicking the decision that faced actual typists (who already knew QWERTY). Nevertheless, we agree that it would be interesting to have a controlled experiment starting with new typists. Unlike Mr. Argiro, however, we cannot claim with certainty what the results will show, although we believe that he will be proved wrong.
Regarding Mr. Armstrong, the myth of Dvorak superiority is promulgated precisely because it is a wonderful example of an alleged market failure. Also, academic theories (and theorists) do not compete in a free and open for-profit marketplace. If they did, a lot of them might well never come to exist. More seriously, it is an important part of our argument that entrepreneurs are the key players guiding markets toward efficient paths, and we regret it if our article did not make this point forcefully enough. While we acknowledge free-riding as a possibility for some network externalities, we do not regard it as a central issue for the typewriter story. Large corporations with typing pools could fairly easily have internalized sufficient gains from switching to a better keyboard to make the switch worthwhile, if the advantages of Dvorak were anything like those that Dvorak claimed. Mr. Hutchings introduces an old debate that usually asks whether Apple is guilty of some misappropriation. We certainly make no accusation of that sort. But it is abundantly clear that Xerox had done much work on the idea of using a mouse with menuing systems well before Apple (even if others not at Xerox were working on the same ideas, and even if they later worked at Apple) and that Apple was influenced by what Xerox did. This doesn't mean that Apple did not improve on the ideas, or that Apple didn't invest much of its own energy trying to optimize its interface. But the major ideas that separated graphical from text interfaces were born at Xerox, not Apple.
We were disappointed, as Mr. Cassingham must be, that his 1986 book cannot be found in our university libraries. Nor is it to be found in the on-line catalogs at Harvard, the University of Michigan, Duke, or the University of Texas at Austin, all of which are thought to have substantial collections. (Readers can easily verify this for themselves.) We therefore cannot comment on Mr. Cassingham's writings.
We did contact his publisher (Freelance Communications, Pasadena) and discovered that they offer only three titles, all of them by Mr. Cassingham. Thus it seems somewhat disingenuous for Mr. Cassingham to refer to his publisher in the third person. This type of exaggeration by Dvorak advocates helps fuel our doubts regarding their claims. Mr. Cassingham's possession of the Navy study is no evidence of its general availability. In any case, Mr. Cassingham's claims are off the mark. Even if it were easy to find a copy of the Navy study, our claim that Dvorak's role is hidden from view is hardly changed by noting that the title page says the study was prepared by the Training Services Division of the Navy. By way of comparison, Strong does not hide his role in the GSA study. Our academic writing, by the way, cites the Navy study in full, crediting the Training Services Division.
The book to which Dvorak was willing to have his name attached does read like an infomercial to us, as we think it would to any unbiased reader. By itself, this hardly proves that it is wrong, since infomercials might well be selling worthwhile products. Boosterism, even for worthwhile products, however, cannot be a substitute for scientific objectivity. Charts and tables by themselves are not scientific unless they report results that are produced in accordance with generally accepted scientific methods. This means, among other things, proper controls, which was not the case in the Dvorak book (Dvorak hardly claimed otherwise). We are certain that the Psychic Friends Network could offer charts and tables as testimonials to its value. The "results" mentioned by Messrs. Cassingham and Argiro ignore this important point. For example, the Keytime data reported by Mr. Cassingham, although admittedly unknown to us, smack of typist self-selection and thus lack of controls, since Mr. Cassingham reports far more QWERTY typists than Dvorak typists.
Finally, we are aware that some Dvorak boosters claim that Strong was biased. We cannot prove otherwise. But serious ergonomic studies, and other studies comparing QWERTY and Dvorak (even those put forward by Yamada, a Dvorak advocate) tend to match the results of Strong, and not the Navy studies. It is the preponderance of evidence, together with the reasonableness of the reported method, that causes us to believe Strong's results. We have seen no convincing evidence that Strong's results were biased, but we are willing to entertain any contrary evidence that is other than just hearsay.