President Obama, Give Us a Yard and We’ll Take a Meter

For all intents and purposes, the United States stands alone in relying on an inefficient and antiquated measurement system. For decades the cry has been that it will be too expensive or too inconvenient or too confusing to change to the worldwide metric standard. With the current economy in dire straits, can we really afford this ridiculous policy? Not only does it makes us look like provincial boobs, but (and this will get people’s attention) it costs us money. If ever there was a golden time to attack the problem with a bold mandate for change, this is it.

The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same

The joke of it all is that the public is already partially dometricated (yes, that’s a word…now)—certainly enough to make adaptation not so painful after all. Soft drinks, wine, liquor, and other consumables are already purchased by the liter (or as the official SI specification badly spells it: litre) and milliliter. When we watch swimming, the races are in meters and kilometers. Shoot, even our engine capacity is measured in liters. This is all common, everyday stuff.

If you work in most industries that sell internationally, you’ve already had to metricate. With effectively every other country in the world being metric, manufacturers have had to add to their bins a full compliment of U.S.-standard and SI tools and fasteners…all to accommodate ONE country. Because both standards are used in U.S. automobile construction (a consequence of having domestic factories of foreign makes), mechanics just LOVE that the U.S. steadfastly holds onto its old ways.

It Costs

Needless to say, having to maintain two full sets of tools and fasteners (and the time wasted in determining which to use for any given part on a car) adds expense. But it isn’t just about the auto industry. On January 1, 2010, a lot of importers and exporters are going to have to spend some extra ducats as well.

The European Union has a law that makes it illegal to label products (and manuals, brochures, etc.) with anything other than SI units. Seems like a little thing, but it will bring increased costs. U.S. exporters have been using the dual labeling of measures as a way to save on the expense of having one set of labels for the U.S. market and another set for everywhere else. This also goes for all of the marketing materials, product inserts, advertising, and more. If I’m in a bad economy where my margins are cut to the bone but I need to export to survive—in all honesty, I’m ditching the U.S.-only stuff as being an unnecessary expense.

But it’s not only the labels of new products. Think of the stuff that is now in inventory: stuff that remains double-labeled. They will have to be corrected to stay in accord with the law. What about an extension to make the necessary changes? This is the extension. The law was extended 10 years a decade ago to allow more time for the change.

Now we have all of this on-going extra expense just to appease one country. Doesn’t seem right, does it? I mean, how would the U.S. react if all of the world was on it’s measurement system but China (say) wasn’t? What if it was costing our companies tens of millions of dollars a year to maintain both systems? Think we’d be a little miffed at that? I’d say so.

And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Numerous more issues abound where costs mount just to allow the U.S. their precious inch-pound system.

Don’t Make Me Change, It’s Too Hard

One of the cries of the inch-pound clingers is that there will be mass confusion, people won’t know what’s what, and frankly it’s just plain hard. This is ridiculous. Everyone else managed the change: from the nerdiest scientist in Berlin to the lowliest beggar in Delhi. I suppose that modern Americans are just too stupid and ignorant to handle it regardless of the numbers of 2-liter bottles populating our landfills.

“I won’t know how much gas to buy.”

“I know how far it is to Smallcityville in miles, but that kilometer thing will mess everything up.”

Blah, blah, blah. WHINERS. It’s true, America has largely become a nation of whiners (witness this very blog). If it requires more effort than mindlessly staring at a screen, it’s just too hard. We need only to look at the DTV transition fiasco to see that we are a cradle of lowest-common-denominator inertia.

As that infamous DTV switch as shown, no amount of coddling or delay will prevent Americans from just sitting on their duffs and waiting for someone else to do it all for them. Fine. I can work with that. The solution is simply to make the change quick and sudden, like pulling off a band-aid.

So, how much gas to buy? Well, a fill-up will still be a fill-up, and $40.00 of gas will still be $40.00 of gas. The rest are just numbers we really don’t pay attention to anyway.

That 2-hour trip to Smallcityville will still take two hours regardless if you drive them in miles or kilometers.

The fact is that we really don’t know how big, large, long, etc. most things in our lives are. They are just numbers. Inside of two weeks everyone will have gotten used to the new numbers when they find out that their lives aren’t in a constant state of mathematical conversions.

The Expense

You know what the amazing thing is? There doesn’t seem to be any credible accounting for what a transition to SI units in the U.S. will cost. People say that it will cost a lot, but somehow I get the impression it won’t cost nearly as much as people assume. In fact, given the example from other countries following their own transitions, gross and net profits are likely to increase, more than swallowing up any initial outlay.

That’s not to say that there isn’t going to be some pain. The construction industry has been especially pernicious when it comes to their time-honored measurements. Some new tool buying will doubtless be in order. Still, everyone else around the world seems to be able to construct houses and buildings and dams and whatnot with those pesky metric tools. It’s not like it’s rocket science or anything. (Oh wait. It is. The standard in rocket science are SI units.) And let’s face it, when an industry can call a piece of wood a 2×4 (ostensibly 2″ by 4″) when it actually measures approximately 1 1/2″ x 3 1/2″ (give or take a 1/4″), it deserves some accuracy thrown at it.

In fact, the actual expenses are probably going to come from: 1) new highway signage for distance and speed; 2) new cooking measures; 3) odometer retrofits. I think of anything, the one huge headache is going to be the odometers as they need to be relied upon once the new signage is in place.

Measure Once, Pay Once

The great thing is that the majority of the transition will only force a one-time payment. As most industries already have some degree of metrication in place anyway, that just leaves two major areas that I think the government should pay for: signage and odometers (they are related, after all).

A lot of the distance measures will be add-ons to current signs (we’ve done this once before, in the 70s, so I know). Not that big of a deal. The speed signs will be a bigger hassle as they will need to be replaced with km/h signs with smaller mph numbers below for transitional convenience.

Beyond that, transition should just go on via natural attrition. Within 15 years almost all vehicles on the road will be metricated. People having to work with durable goods—for example, in and around construction—especially folks like plumbers, will have a harder time than some because of the need to have to double-stock tools and materials (though the coupling-converter sub-industry should boom for a while).  The thing is that most items don’t last much longer than a generation, maybe two. Inside of 50 years, only specialists will have to worry about how we used to do it.

How much will all of this cost? A few billion dollars, but the medium- and long-term benefits will more than cover that brief expense.

Yes We Can (and MUST)

The fact is that not being metric costs the U.S. in many ways. The time has come to bite the bullet and just move forward on a national scale. The ONLY time factor should be the amount of time to manufacture and install the new signage.

The people are going to scream. Elected officials are going to bluster. More than a few are going to say it’s all about socialism or communism or some other -ism that it’s in fashion to bash. In about a year, maybe two, people will mostly be saying with relief, “Finally!”

The American public is not going to embrace this change. Some of it is inertia. Some is a sociological prejudice that if it didn’t originate in America then it can’t be the right way of doing things. It needs to be accepted from the outset that there is going to be pain in the beginning and that a slow roll-out will be about as successful as the DTV transition.

Can we do this? Yes we can. Can we profit from it? Yes we can. Can we join the rest of the nations in a common standard? Yes we can. Can we get used to decimals instead of fractions? Yes we can. Can the president start the ball rolling? Yes he can.

Sometimes in a nation’s history a government has to do things that large segments of the population don’t want to have happen. Ending slavery. Integration. Women’s suffrage. It’s time to add metrication to that list. We have nothing to fear but the avoirdupois system itself. Beat down your yardsticks and march to a new meter. Ask not what your measurements have meant to you, ask what your measurements can do for your country. A gram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure.

Change is our current necessity. In the midst of this economic shift, the time has finally reached a nexus for us to throw off old ideas and old ways and head boldly toward our future.