Based on the distance your fingers have to move to type average words on qwerty and dvorak, it's really impossible that Dvorak wouldn't be loads better.It's sort of like claiming that someone wouldn't be faster at running 50 meters than 100 meters. Of course, where this analogy falls down is that you have to learn a new skill, which means there's an upfront cost and thus makes the whole issue interesting economically.

The article claims that the cost of learning the new skill could never be amortized and uses this evidence:

> In the first phase of the experiment, 10 government typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over 25 days of four-hour-a-day training for these typists to catch up to their old QWERTY speeds. (Compare this to the Navy study's results.) When the typists had finally caught up to their old speeds, the second phase of the experiment began. The newly trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of 10 QWERTY typists (matched in skill to the Dvorak typists) began a parallel program to improve their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than did QWERTY typists training on QWERTY keyboards. Thus Strong concluded that Dvorak training would never be able to amortize its costs. He recommended instead that the government provide further training in the QWERTY keyboard for QWERTY typists.

I really can't express how stupid this is. The logical implication the article would have you draw from this study is that qwerty actually may be MORE efficient. To believe this, you'd have to believe that the top end hypothetical speed of qwerty is higher than dvorak. This is literally physically impossible, as I've already pointed out. Moreover, the fastest typist ever used Dvorak. While that's not conclusive, it's suggestive. Folks trying to optimize a skill to the highest level are very good at cutting out all inefficiencies.

To understand the results of the study cited there, we need only look to exercise science. First of all, what most lay people don't realize is that a great deal of exercise results for activities like weight training is explained by the exercise's affect on your nervous system, not your muscles. Properly managing your nervous system response is at the heart of continued gains, and not managing it properly leads to overtraining and plateaus. All top flight Olympic athletic coaches spend much of their time thinking about this.

As a matter of fact, it is a well known and well documented phenomenon in the literature that if you train at close to maximal capacity on the same training regimen for longer than 3 to 4 weeks, you will stop making gains. You'll see big increases the first 3 weeks, and after that, nothing. This is a nervous system effect.

Armed with that knowledge, it becomes clear why the study's results look the way they do: The dvorak trainee were already in a state of CNS fatigue, whereas the qwerty trainees were starting out fresh.

Dvorak is clearly better than qwerty. Colemak is even more better. However, I don't think this situation is much of an indictment of the free market. I don't think the bottleneck in most people's productivity now (or ever) was top end typing speed and it would take quite a long time to recover the cost of the switch. Considering that this is THE MOST concrete example ever cited where you might be able to say that government meddling could induce a positive effect, I'm not inclined to agree that it's in general a good idea to have our economic lives centrally manipulated. There are far more examples of net economic losses from government interference.