Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be terrible. Ideographic written languages are hard to learn (you need to memorize much more to get basic skills) and hard to parse (tokenization is more difficult). Of course, if that means the entire world speaks the same language, the price would be worth it. But I doubt we will converge on anything that is difficult to master, since water takes the path of least resistance.
That's not actually true. When MacArthur tried to get rid of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese writing during the post-WW2 occupation, he backed off when it was embarrassingly pointed out that Japan had a higher literacy rate than the US, despite having less of an investment in state schools at the time. Studies have shown that it does not take more time or effort for a child to learn to read and write Chines…
As alphabetic orthographies go, English is almost uniquely horrible, though, so that's hardly surprising. Have they tried comparing to e.g. Spanish?
And yes, when we read with a practiced eye, we do pattern match entire words at once. But it's much easier to get to that point with a simpler, composable writing system - and the advantage of the alphabet (or a syllabary) is that you can still read everything before you get there, just slower. And that's just the reading part - the advantages of a decently phonemic alphabet or syllabary for writing are even more blatant.