Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4081045" data-attributes="member: 4937">I feel compelled to point out that this is far from the same as them not being defensible.It's sort of like saying, "I don't see how Nixon won.  No one I know voted for him."1) The justifications for the metric system are primarily political.  For example, it was adopted in France as part of the French revolution, then rejected as revolutionary zeal when revolutionary zeal became unfashionable, brought back when it came back into fashion, and so forth.  Arguably, its still all about politics.2) The more industrialized your country is, the heavier the economic burden there is to adopting the metric system because all your existing machines must then be replaced.  It's very cheap to adopt the system if you are not particularly industrialized.  Much more expensive if you are say the UK or the USA, which is not coincidently were most of the oposition came.3) The longer into the industrial revolution you get, the more expensive the economic burden is in switching.  Early adopters can interchange metric and English parts because of the generally high tolerances.  Late adopters cannot because the machines requires exacting dimensions.  I think its pretty safe to say that by the 1950's certainly, as a practical matter, it was impossible for the USA to change.  The only areas where it seems to work are products introduced after that time, say plastic soda bottles.4) The larger your internal economy, the less need you have to change.  You can always keep selling to yourself.  This is why the USA wasn't an early adopter.  Similarly, the larger your internal monoculture, the less need you have to change because pretty much everyone is already using the same standard.  Contrast this with France when they adopted it, where there were multiple regional variations on the weight of a 'pound'.5) It's worth noting that metric measurements only were adopted where they fit peoples existing ideas somewhat.  The metric hour didn't prove to be much of a hit.</blockquote>

Verification