"Bob Harrington" writes:
Can you name even a single country that adopted its customary
units from the US?

Can you name a single country that reached the spectacular levels of
power, productivity, and wealth as the US - which did it without the
metric system?

Economic success is driven by a large number of factors, of which
the choice of units of measurements is clearly quite negligible
compared to other factors, for example social security policies
or whether your currency is overrated because of its reference
role in the energy market.

Putting aside the fact that Japan and Germany have not been doing
particularly well economically during the past decade, both countries
have clearly been most formidable industrial powers and by all means a
match for the US in terms of economic growth for most of the 20th
century. There are numerous examples of smaller economies (India and
Ireland come to mind as shining examples), where the move to the metric
system coincided with substantial and sustained economic and
industrial development.

If you look at a more short-term view, let me also remind you that
the US is at present the only country that finds it necessary to
reintroduce trade tarifs to protect its uncompetitive non-metric steel
industry, a step that was recently declared illegal by the WTO. Poverty
levels in the US are unmatched in the EU. The inch-based human
spaceflight programme, originally conceived entirely as a media-effective
national prestige stunt, is in shambles.

The metric-based JPL space probes, as well as the metric US Department
of Defence, on the other hand seem to be doing rather fine these days, as
is the mostly metric semiconductor industry. With a bit more work, it would
not be difficult to make the case that the most successful enterprises
the US undertakes TODAY are already done metric. Running some an inch-pound
business is today a good indicator that you are a member of the tail end of
the US economy!