Did you ever wonder why the computer keyboard has the design it does? It is called QWERTY, named after the first six letters located under the numbers, where you might expect to see ABCDEF.
The reason for this oddity is that the keyboard was designed in the 1870s for primitive mechanical typewriters. Some typebars (bars with letters on the end) kept hitting one another, stopping the flow of writing. By separating the most-used letters, the QWERTY layout reduced clashes of this kind (and in the process probably slowed down the typist).
But why do we have the same keyboard today, long after typebars no longer run into one another—in fact, typebars having long ago disappeared? That is the subject of a debate that reflects different views of how markets operate.
Path Dependence?
According to some economists, the explanation for today’s keyboard is “path dependence.” Led by Paul David, who wrote an article called “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” [1] they argue that even though better keyboard arrangements came along, there was technological “lock-in” once typists became accustomed to QWERTY.
“[J]ust when it had become evident that any micro-technological rationale for QWERTY’s dominance was being removed by the progress of typewriter engineering, the U.S. industry was rapidly moving towards the standard of an upright front-stroke machine with a four-row QWERTY keyboard that was referred to as ’the Universal.’” [2]
This perverse outcome, according to David, came about because manufacturers didn’t want to lose business by starting a different design. Once a certain pattern was adopted, it was extremely hard to change. An inherent flaw in markets, he said, is that historical accidents can result in permanent disadvantages.
David supported this “lock-in” claim with a story about a better keyboard that could not get into the market. This was the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK), named for its co-inventor, August Dvorak. who received a patent in 1936. According to David, the Navy found that typists typed faster with DSK, and retraining costs were low.
“U.S. Navy experiments had shown that the increased efficiency obtained with DSK would amortize the cost of retraining a group of typists within the first ten days of their subsequent full-time employment.”[3]
Yet QWERTY continued to be the standard. David suggested that path dependence locked typing into an inferior technology through circumstances all too typical of markets.
Not Superior After All?
Enter S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, two economists who view markets as more complex than David does. In their 1990 article, “Fable of the Keys,” they delved into the historical details underlying QWERTY. [4]
It turns out that August Dvorak was the primary person conducting the U.S. Navy tests of the DSK keyboard! Indeed, he was also an investor in the keyboard. And when typing studies were examined moire fully, they turned out to be statistically sloppy or ambiguous. “The most dramatic claims are traceable to Dvorak himself, and the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard,” wrote Liebowitz and Margolis. [5]
Furthermore, the market was more competitive than David implied. Since typewriter manufacturers trained most typists in the early days, they could have trained the typists on their own keyboards at little cost. Several non-QWERTY typewriters did have some success for awhile, and around World War II, some companies “offered to convert Qwerty typewriters to Dvorak for a very small fee.” [6] Apparently, they found few takers.
All in all, in spite of widespread acceptance of the “lock-in{” story, the Dvorak keyboard doesn’t come off as a superior instrument. “History has largely ignored events that did not build toward the eventual domination by Qwerty,” they explained. [7]
The Bigger Picture
By puncturing the DSK story, Liebowitz and Margolis were aiming at something larger—just as David had been aiming at a distinctive view of how markets work. David’s “path dependence” model of the market, they said, is a “sterile model of competition” in which “an exogenous set of goods [something developed outside the market] is offered for sale at a price, take it or leave it. ” In that view of economics, “There is little or no role for entrepreneurs. There generally are no guarantees, no rental markets, no mergers, no loss-leader pricing, no advertising, no market research.” [8] Yet, they said, all those features can be found in markets.
In 2009, an article in the American Economic Review gave Liebowitz and Margolis empirical support. Tanjim Hossain and John Morgan used experimental economics to determine how likely it is for market participants to continue with an inferior product over time. They found no such examples. Their conclusion:
“While the QWERTY effect is certainly an interesting theoretical possibility, the dearth of examples of the phenomenon, both in the field and now in the lab, leads us to conclude that the danger lies more in the minds of theorists than in the reality of the marketplace.” [9]
So, yes, we use QWERTY and we should not be embarrassed to do so.
Notes
[1] Paul David, ” Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review 75, no. 2 (May 1985), 332-337. (Clio is the Greek muse of history.)
[2] David, 334.
[3] David, 332.
[4] S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, “The Fable of the Keys,” Journal of Law and Economics 33, no. 1 (Apr., 1990): 1-25.
[5] Liebowitz and Margolis, 21.
[6], Liebowitz and Margolis, 5.
[7] Liebowitz and Margolis, 21.
[8] Liebowitz and Margolis, 22.
[9] Tanjim Hossain and John Morgan, “The Quest for QWERTY,” American Economic Review 99, no. 2 (2009): 435–440, at 440.
Image by Matt Bargar is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
I suggest a simple explanation of why QWERTY never changed–short term costs appeared greater than long term benefits, Or put it more formally: the present cost of change (personal and institutional) seemed greater than the the present value of future benefits.
“Seemed” I use because if anyone could do an accurate calculation, it would not be more convincing than emotions. As a touch typist for 67 years, change would be a hassle with few benefits even though programming has eliminated all the engineering and structural obstacles. This despite the fact that learning a new keyboard takes only a day or two, which I know from learning touch typing in Cyrllic. Getting up to speed is merely practice. But practice, like calisthenics is boring and tedious.
I heard a different story about the keyboard . . . that the letters were arranged the way they were because of ease of typing. The letters that were used most often were the “home keys” (a-s-d-f-j-k-l-;-); the ones that were not used as much— e.g., q and z and x— were put by the left pinky (as that was the weakest finger); the ones that were used the most—e.g., e and i—were put by the middle fingers (as they were the strongest fingers). Anyway, who knows? It’s fun to read about it, isn’t it?
The story of QWERTY exemplifies how some economists undervalue culture. It’s not merely that it’s hard to break a cultural phenomenon or costly to do so. It’s that retaining set ways of doing things has great benefits for the human psyche: Knowing that there are “permanent things” (even keyboard styles) gives people a feeling of comfort, it reassures them as to the controllable nature of the environment, it gives them things in common (including the common benefit of being about to gripe about the arrangement of a keyboard), and sometimes a feeling of empowerment. Such feelings are important to human flourishing.
And retaining customs for which change is not important better enables us to concentrate on issues for which change is more important.
We’ve seen what happens to a society when cultural norms break down. That’s why some libertarians I know have become more conservative in recent years.
Rob, you offer a somewhat different gloss on the QWERTY story than I had, but you remind me of a statement from Alfred Whitehead cited by F. A. Hayek in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” Whitehead said:
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism . . . that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”