Barron's Editorial a few days ago.... Nat
-------------------------------------------------- November 25th, 2002 Measure for Measure It's time for the United States to join the world in using the metric system By THOMAS G. DONLAN Fundamental Rights Oh drat! We missed National Metric Week again. It was the week of Oct. 6 and we are only getting around to plugging it now, toward the end of November. In a way, of course, our ignorance was appropriate, since it matches the way the United States has officially been on the metric system for more than a decade now, with deliberately limited results in public use of meters, grams, and liters. Americans buy liquor, wine and soda pop by the liter, but beer by the fluid ounce. They buy medicines by the milligram, but meat by the pound. Most Americans have no idea what a hectare is. Our national devotion to feet, yards, pounds, ounces, acres would astonish Thomas Jefferson, a devoutly logical man who first proposed that the U.S. adopt a decimal measuring system when he was secretary of state in 1790. Fortunately, he persuaded Congress to go along with decimal coinage, rather than pounds, shillings and pence. But generations of Americans would have had an easier time measuring everything but wealth if Congress had heeded him and abandoned the mile of 5,280 feet, the acre of four roods, the bushel of eight gallons, the avoirdupois and troy ounces and all the other medieval baggage of the antique system. In some ways, the United States has been officially on the metric system for more than a century. Using metric measurements has been legal since 1866. The U.S. signed an international metrification treaty in 1875. In 1890, the National Bureau of Standards took delivery of the official national kilogram, a precise duplicate of the world standard kilogram enshrined in Paris. And in 1893, the U.S. pound was officially defined as 0.4535924277 kilogram, and the yard as 3600/3937th of a meter. But that was nearly the end of progress, if we define progress as getting on with using a decimal measuring system. In 1906, Congress rejected a bill to put the metric system into general use. A metrification law enacted in 1975 required the federal government to use the system wherever "practical," and many reasons have been found to declare it impractical to buy things in metric sizes. Things that are "scientific" have gone metric with occasionally mixed results: Food packages are usually in the antique system; nutrition labels are in metric. Thus the nutrition label on a 1.5 ounce bag of potato chips reveals that the contents include 12 milligrams of fat. A footnote offers a conversion table for grams to calories, but not grams to ounces. American advocates of forced metrification (The U.S. Metric Association prefers "metrication," but almost everybody ignores the association and its word.) have been frustrated over and over again, although they jealously look abroad for inspiration. They say scornfully that only the United States, Burma and Liberia don't use the metric system, and they claim that not going metric costs U.S. industry billions of dollars in lost export business. If you believe that, you probably also believe that American investors have saved the promised billions of dollars since share prices were decimalized. Unfortunately for their cause, metrificators are exaggerating the ease of the task and its benefits. Metrification hasn't been easy anywhere. Even France, which metrified under the imperial fiat of Napoleon, did not complete the conversion until long after the emperor's death. The European Union, which has the dubious advantage of an army of bureaucrats setting standards for everything, still permits dual labeling in the metric system and the antique system. Apparently the antique system still enjoys some market power. Indeed it does: To the north, Canada went metric in 1971 and put its speed limit signs in kilometers (or kilometres) per hour, along with nearly all measurements that government uses. But in 1984 a new government made further metrification optional, leaving the process in a state of suspended animation. One must buy frozen turkeys by the kilogram and fresh turkeys by the pound, even in the same store. A new government in the United Kingdom, formerly the land of the 20-ounce Imperial pint, went the other way, ending the shilly-shallying of a voluntary system and imposing metrification in concert with the EU. Freeborn Englishmen rebelled, and in a test case last year a grocer was fined for selling bananas by the pound. Only the tabloid press was delighted, and enforcement has ground nearly to a halt. Leaving both the metric system and the antique system in contemporaneous use has drawbacks, some more serious than a confusion of turkey weights or the sensational prosecution of fruit merchants. One far-out disaster occurred in 1999, when NASA lost a spacecraft intended to orbit Mars. Some data on rocket thrust that JPL thought was in metric was actually in pounds, so a rocket burn for orbital insertion was drastically mistimed. And an Air Canada jetliner ran out of fuel in 1983 because it was loaded with thousands of pounds of fuel instead of thousands of kilograms. Fortunately, the pilot was able to glide to an emergency landing strip. These are, of course, human errors. They happened because humans did not recognize the accidental measurement traps that other humans had set by not agreeing on a single simple system. In the United States, we must lay this fault at the door of Congress. Fixing the standard of weights and measures is one of its enumerated powers in the Constitution. Since 1975, however, Congress has only attempted a conversion to the stealth metric system. Government buys and builds things in the metric system, hoping to jump-start the free market. All it has done is raise the cost of doing business with the government. Currently, Congress is ignoring even the lesser challenge of whether to allow certain products to be packaged and labeled in metric units alone, which might make them more acceptable in foreign markets. There are few places in the economy where the government can actually legislate American efficiency. The system of weights and measures is one of them. Congress can and should convert the country to the metric system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Fundamental Rights "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" The New York Stock Exchange, whose rules have the force of law when approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission under Congressional authority, thinks it can abridge the freedom of security analysts and the media. Analysts must disclose their ownership positions in stocks they discuss, and disclose their firms' possible conflicts of interest. That rule already flies too close to the First Amendment, but the NYSE wants to go further: If an analyst makes one of these disclosures to a reporter, and his newspaper, magazine or broadcast outlet chooses not to mention it, the NYSE demands that the firm not talk to the publication any more. After decades of interviewing analysts and reading the fruits of our colleagues' interviews, we are sorely tempted to go along. Being cut off by analysts has its appeal. We should do our own research, read company reports ourselves and shmooze with executives directly, rather than by proxy. But the Constitution insists that's our business and the analysts' business, not the business of the stock exchange and the SEC. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan receives e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED] REPRINTS INFORMATION: To distribute multiple copies of this article, visit the Dow Jones Reprints site. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Return to top of page Copyright � 2002 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Copyright information. Nat Hager's webpage http://www.win.net/dorsea/nehager
