A few years ago there was a lot of noise about the U.S. finally going metric. We saw road signs with mile and kilometer equivalents and soda bottles containing peculiar fractions of liters that corresponded to quarts and ounces. Then what happened? No one talks about metric anymore. How come? Is there any serious metric movement? Is not going metric part of the decline of U.S. industry in world markets? –Eric Gordon, New York
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Like hell. Had U.S. industry suffered a real (as opposed to relative) decline, Americans would have quit screwing around and converted to metric long ago, just as the UK did–and remember, the British are the ones who invented this dram-bushel-inch stuff. As it is, U.S. industry is sufficiently prosperous and the domestic market is so large that the country can afford the luxury of supporting two separate systems of measurement. Which is basically what it has. Most big multinational firms use metric for goods they sell abroad, and some (e.g., the automakers) have abandoned the inch-pound system altogether. Smaller companies serving primarily the U.S. market and of course most ordinary folks have clung to the old system, mainly for lack of a compelling reason to change. If significant numbers of midsize firms routinely had to convert from millimeters to inches (how fast can you multiply by .03937?), opposition to metrication would evaporate. But in the U.S. they don’t, and it hasn’t.
These arguments are specious. If people still calculate horse races in furlongs, a medieval measure, there’s nothing to prevent them from using feet and yards in sports indefinitely (although the Olympics have gotten people used to meters). And while converting to metric costs something, much of the money has already been spent. Rare is the auto mechanic, for example, who doesn’t have metric wrenches.
