It's hard to underestimate the damage this curious book has caused since its publication in 1936. The U.S. v. Microsoft anti-trust case, the dot.com boom/bubble, professional embarrassment for Paul Krugman--The Economics of QWERTY--and numerous other prominent intellectuals (though Krugman did manage to still win the Nobel Prize for economics in 2008).



The book can be divided into two parts, first some highly dubious psychology;



"Will you take the successful way of the superior typing student? Or is it to be the troubled path of the inferior typing student, who must comprise his failure with alibis or day dreams, or the casting of blame, or 'sour grapes'."



and,



"...a bulk of [typing] errors is a personal matter. It results from underlying personal troubles.... Sometimes the errors may be part of a young typist's queer attempts to overcome personal trouble."



In the second half though, we are introduced to the evils of the "universal" (or QWERTY) keyboard that Dvorak spent much of his life trying to dislodge. He failed, but not for lack of enthusiasm;



"What is left of the home row [in the QWERTY, standard, keyboard]? Little more than one half of your successive stroking even partly touches these more efficient home positions.... This lack of any genuine home row to receive and speed the bulk of your typewriting clinches the unfitness of the 'universal' keyboard arrangement in common use....the kind of reaches and hurdles unduly forced into all your typewriting by the haphazard keyboard arrangement in common use....the 'universal' typewriter keyboard...has scant reference to the adaptability of your hand skills to the sequence patterns of the written language."



Turned out that Dvorak was wrong. The QWERTY keyboard works as well as any other keyboard arrangement ever concocted, including Dvorak's 'Simplified Keyboard' (DSK). His life's mission ended ignominiously. As Jared Diamond put it in his 1997 Discover Magazine piece, 'The Curse of QWERTY'; 'August Dvorak died in 1975, a bitter man: I'm tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race, he complained. They simply don't want to change!'



Not that he's the kind of guy for "the casting of blame, or 'sour grapes'".



Lest anyone think this is ancient history, for the economics profession the controversy over Dvorak's keyboard is still hot. This summer (June 17-19, 2013) in Barcelona, Spain, Scottish economist Neil Kay will be delivering his paper 'The QWERTY PROBLEM', at the 35th DRUID Celebration Conference. The abstract of that paper reads;



"This paper reviews the emergence of the QWERTY standard which in turn has lent its name to what [in their textbook] Krugman and Wells (2006) describe as the 'QWERTY problem: an inferior industry standard that has prevailed possibly because of historical accident'. QWERTY was neither inefficient nor an accident, it was engineered by Christopher Latham Sholes in 1873 to be as near-optimal as possible given the technology and user needs of his day. To achieve this, Sholes used a simple meta-rule that is obvious once articulated but which has not been publicly recognised until recently. Despite its general adoption as 'paradigm case' in the literature on path dependence, the analysis here finds the evidence is not consistent with QWERTY being a path dependent phenomenon, nor does QWERTY provide any basis for policy prescriptions based on common interpretations of what constitutes 'the QWERTY problem'."



This book is the origin of that problem. The evil that men do....