Metric Envy

There is much I would like to challenge about America (our nonexistent gun control, our in-name-only democracy, the fact that someone charged in four criminal cases can still win Presidential primaries), but nothing seems more obviously inane than our choice not to play with the rest of the civilized world and to stick instead with the comedic absurdity of Imperial weights and measures.

You know, the system we’ve come to accept as normal and teach our kids with grit teeth as if it’s logical and obvious that a foot will be based on one dead person’s shoe size; 5,280 of them will make a mile. Sixteen ounces are a pound (abbreviated “lbs.” of course) and 2,000 of them make a ton. Eight pints make one gallon, which by the way, is for milk and paint but not for alcohol and soda, since we also dip our pale British-inclined toes into the metric system for further confusion.

The recent Saturday Night Live skit on this set in Revolutionary times was so genius, I wanted my kids to share it with their math and science teachers so they could discuss and perhaps grow some grassroots efforts to petition for change. The great racial inequity thread running through this and continually shoved under the rug also makes it worthy to share with the history and social studies teachers while they’re at it:

What would it take to get us to clean this mess? Who decides such things?

We have the ridiculous feats of feet of above, or we could have this clean clear simplicity, as one online commenter wrote: “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is one percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. You can’t directly relate any of those quantities in the American system.”

Metrication or metrification is the process of introducing the International System of Units (SI) or the metric system to replace a jurisdiction’s traditional measures. In the US, SI, born in 1960, has been officially “preferred” by law but not mandatory since 1975. From the US Metric Association (USMA), which since 1916 has been advocating for full official conversion and you can join them:

The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 (later amended by the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, the Savings in Construction Act of 1996, and the Department of Energy High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004) designated the metric system as the preferred system of weights and measures for US trade and commerce, and directed federal agencies to convert to the metric system, to the extent feasible, including the use of metric in construction of federal facilities.

It also created the United States Metric Board to assist in the conversion, although the Board no longer exists.

Sadly this board was dissolved in 1982, with a letter from President Ronald Reagan citing budget cuts: “I appreciate your cooperation in the orderly phaseout of the Board’s activities as part of my program to reduce government spending and streamline its operations.”

While the industries of science, medicine, electronics, automotive production, and the military and international affairs divisions have converted on a voluntary basis, and Federal law of 1994 at least mandates dual measure packaging labels, going the distance nationwide on, for instance, all the mile marker signs on highways is up against social resistance, and budget bigotry.

In 1995 there was a report by the US General Accounting Office to the House of Representatives on the cost of conversion: HIGHWAY SIGNS: Conversation to Metric Units Could Be Costly. “No comprehensive national estimate of the costs to convert US highway signs to metric units has been developed, and most states have not developed anything beyond very preliminary estimates. One exception, Alabama, developed an average conversion cost of about $70 per sign in February 1995. If Alabama’s estimate is accurate, the cost of converting the approximately 6 million signs on the nation’s state and local roads could amount to about $420 million.” So multiply that by whatever to account for inflated 2024 pricing and you’ve got a big bill.

But, as always there’s the cost upfront to swallow in order to potentially save much more money down the road. While that math never seems to prove possible for government, no one knows it better than big business. The USMA has a whole page of links to articles about conversions that paid off long-term for companies like Exxon, Ford, Procter & Gamble, IBM, and on and on. As is our hopes for any real green energy revolution, government begins by offering business incentives, commerce starts offering options, consumers vote with their dollars, change accrues and tips the balance. Before you know it from California on east, it will be all EVs and maybe someday their odometers will come in km/hr, but only, argues the USMA, if there’s a real plan underpinning this.

The US Metric Study report has deferred until now a dollars-and-cents evaluation of why going metric by a coordinated national plan would be more advantageous than going metric without such a plan.

What kinds of costs were considered? They included out-of-pocket payments for physical changes in things: for example, modifying scales or buying new ones, altering gasoline pumps, adjusting or replacing machinery, repainting highway signs, rewriting plans and specifications. They also involved intangibles, such as having to learn new words and how to use them, having to work more slowly for a while in order to avoid mistakes, and having to do arithmetic in order to understand an item in the newspaper.

Putting price tags on benefits is even more problematic. Some metric calculations are easier; indeed, educators say schoolchildren learn the metric system more quickly, and time could be saved for other topics. Compatibility and interchangeability of military equipment used by the US and its allies would facilitate repairs and maintenance.

Another category of benefits is not only intangible but also indirect. They are in the nature of byproducts. People, while making the metric change, would have opportunities to do other worthwhile things that are not directly related to any measurement system. Translating textbooks into metric terms would provide opportunities for curriculum improvements. In thinking out new metric standards, engineers would have an opportunity to weed out superfluous sizes and varieties of parts and materials, and even to incorporate superior technologies. International standards activities would be facilitated.

Taking advantage of these opportunities would, in effect, be beneficial and would, therefore, help to recoup the costs of going metric.

If you ask me, the voluntary approach (snail’s pace) needs a blast of the fast way countries like Australia just off-like-a-bandaided it—the same way they did with a massive and effective gun buyback program after a mass shooting in 1996—and declared their country go mandatory metric by such a such date, end of story, with non-metric units having no legal bearing in business or courts except by preceding contracts and with terminal dates.

Until we take a real stand, the extent of metric use in the US is quietly responsible for more than you may realize. Again from USMA:

• Metric units are now required along with customary units on most consumer products.
• About 50% of measures in the US are metric.
• All customary measures are defined and calibrated to the metric system.
• The Metric Conversion Act, first passed in 1975 and amended in 1988, is still in effect in the US, making the metric system the preferred system of measurement in the US, encouraged by the government.

Ironically, even the United Kingdom, in the grand age of Monty Python (“I fart in your general direction”), scoffed at its silly Imperial measures and threw them away in the 1970s. “Only a few small countries, including some unlisted Caribbean nations heavily influenced by the US, have not formally adopted the use of SI. Among countries not claiming to be metric, the US is the only significant holdout.”

Why oh why does America always have to be so ornery? We are, evolutionarily-speaking, only teenagers compared to other ancient nations. Whatever cost we have to pay is small compared to the dead weight of our foolishness. But the quarter-pounders! It’s true it’s hard to shake an entire nation out of how we perceive all things we touch, see, eat and do. Intuition and comfort with the new measures will come in time with practice as we retrain our brains to convert to Simple Things That Make Sense, as in the chart below. Until then, the biggest obstacle we have of making this happen is overcoming our very American fear of change.

As one in a Reddit commenter said in a thread: “I grew up using one system and that’s the system I use to conceptualize what’s big, small, tall, short, hot, cold, far, and close. It’s a pretty big deal. And that’s why you’re going to have a hard time getting the typical American to use metric.”

Or another: “The US public is more comfortable with Fahrenheit temperatures, gallon milk jugs, quarter-pound hamburgers, 100-yard football fields, standard weights, and 2×4 lumber. But the metric system is steadily increasing in daily use.”

We can get there more quickly through our kids, our best little test pigs. Teach them, please, teachers with all your might and centimeter rulers. Celebrate Metric Week on October 10th (shout out to my deceased engineer dad’s birthday 10/10!), by showing them how easy and wonderful it is to just move decimal points to and fro to solve all your earthly problems.

For the rest of us with no teachers, there’s YouTube, and videos like how to Learn the Metric System in 5 minutes:

While we’re learning, growing, and fixing everything, could we also do away with the dizzying back and forth clock changes of Daylight Savings Time? The “Sunshine Protection Act” was unanimously passed by the Senate in 2022 but didn’t pass the House and was not signed into law by President Biden. So we remain in the dark, except for Arizona and Hawaii who don’t bother with this nonsense. A 2023 version of the act remains, like so many good things, stuck in Congress. (According to the Pew Research Center only about a third of the world’s countries, mostly in Europe, also practice this clock manipulation. So at least on this front, we aren’t entirely alone in our stubbornness.)

Let’s bug our legislators, covert our own lives and small businesses to metric as much as possible, and sing this topic out, with the mile-heavy “Galaxy Song” from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life:

What others things do we cling to that don’t serve us—in our systems and in our personal lives—that could use discarding?