Markus Kuhn wrote:
"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!

Or have been around and successful far longer than the metric/standard
debate has been raging...

Personally, I wouldn't mind if we did go metric - I'm comfortable with
each system, and prefer some of the features of the metric system - but
I seriously doubt your claims that the metric system alone can make or
break most endeavors alone. If your customers want metric widgets, you
build metric widgets; but if your customers have happily survived using
non-metric widgets for decades, why force them to incur the costs of
replacing their widgetry for mere political expediency?

The nations you mentioned that began their industrial revolutions (or
were forced by their own actions to have to rebuild from scratch) in the
last century had the luxury of being able to choose the most useful
system early on; the USA has been enormously successful with the
standard system for over two hundred years. Many parts of the US
economy have and are making the shift to, or added capability for, the
metric system as the need arises; but forcing the entire economy to
change for reasons no more substantial than social reengineering is
wasteful and an abuse of governmental power.

Bob ^,,^