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November 25th,
2002
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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.
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