NOTE: "The Standard and Dvorak Keyboards Revisited: Direct
Measures of Speed" by Leonard J. West is an unusual paper to appear in the Santa
Fe Institute Working Papers Series. The paper was written for researchers in
vocational education rather than economists per se. What makes this paper
important to the SFI Economics community is its focus on what has become one of
the canonical examples of path dependence in economics, namely, the relative
efficiency of the standard typewriter keyboard versus available competitors. As
Brian Arthur discusses in the introduction to his Increasing Returns and
Path Dependence in the Economy, the near universal adoption of the QWERTY
keyboard when a more efficient alternative, the Dvorak, existed, played an
important role in the development of his thinking on path dependence in the
early 1980s. Paul David's "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY" (American Economics
Review 1985) has become a standard empirical citation in the path dependence
literature. Consequently, recent attacks on the importance of path dependence in
understanding the economy have to some extent been based on claims that the
QWERTY keyboard is actually more efficient than the Dvorak alternative.
Professor West's paper is an interesting and all too rare effort at research
which directly explores this issue, and provides evidence in support of the view
that path dependence can lead to various inefficiencies in the economy.
Steven N. Durlauf
Director, Economics Program
Keywords:
Keyboards, typewriters, Dvorak, path dependence