At 21 September 2005, 01:52 AM, Philip S Hall wrote:
Jim Elwell wrote:
And, to be sure, nothing ever posted on this forum has convinced me
we "need" to do it quickly, since such posts never address the
costs of metricating.
Have you considered Jim, the suggestion, which I think has been
mentioned before, that metricating slowly makes it more expensive?
(apologies for the length of this)
(1) The question as you phrase it cannot be answered, largely because
it treats a huge country with 15 million business and tens of
thousands of government agencies and 300 million citizens as a
homogeneous whole. More expensive to whom? What if metricating fast
saves money for one group but costs another group? What if
metricating fast saves everyone money, but the costs are borne by a
small group? etc.
Noting that the question is more complex than presented, here is my answer:
(2) Start with Pat Naughtin's article
http://www.metricationmatters.com/articles.html
Notice the list of questions under his first question. Who knows the
answer to these? Well, NO ONE knows the answers. Furthermore, they
are asked largely to illustrate there are costs to NOT metricating.
However, there are also many questions one could ask that illustrate
that there are costs TO metricate. For example:
(a) How much money is lost by obsoleting perfectly good tools and
equipment that cannot be adapted for metric purposes?
(b) How much money is lost as non-metric parts for maintaining
equipment become harder to find and more costly?
(c) How much money is spent metricating a product and related
equipment when there is no benefit to doing so (e.g., food isn't any
more nutritions in kilograms than pounds).
The point here is that there are costs TO metricate and costs to NOT
metricate. And no one in the world knows what those costs are.
(2) There is a widely-believed economic fallacy that was debunked 150
years ago, but still persists, that money spent for "good" things is
always a net gain. It is most commonly seen after a disaster such as
Katrina, when economically-ignorant reporters say something like "The
rebuilding will be great for the economy!"
With just a bit of reflection you can see this is utterly foolish.
Would anyone suggest tearing down houses and buildings just to
improve the economy?
Way back in 1850 the great French economist and politician, Frederick
Bastiat, wrote an article entitled "That Which is Seen, and That
Which is Not Seen," which showed this "spending to rebuild" to be
entirely foolish. You can read it at http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html.
What you will see in the article is that money spent to metricate
MUST come from something else, and only if we compare the costs to
metricate versus the savings of doing so can we possibly know if and
when we should metricate. Merely looking at the savings, regardless
of how large they are, is not enough.
(3) So, if the information needed to make the decision (costs to
metricate, costs to not metricate) is unknown and unknowable, how do
we decide when to metricate?
At this point I have to divide the question into two pieces: public
metrication (e.g., road signs, government operations) and private
metrication (e.g., business and individuals).
PUBLIC: I'm perfectly happy letting public metrication be determined
by the political process. It's tiresome, messy, often corrupt, etc.,
but it is the system we have. If the pro-metricationists can gain
enough influence to get road signs metricated, that is fine by me.
And, as I have pointed out many times, if we simply metricated the US
government, which is the world's largest single purchaser of goods
and services, that would provide tremendous incentive for private
businesses to metricate, so they could keep selling to the government.
Where there is a significant role for the government in terms of
public safety (e.g., drugs, highways, airlines), let the political
process take care of it.
(Oh, obviously related, laws largely intended to prevent fraud (e.g.,
FPLA) should not prohibit metric units.)
PRIVATE: the only moral solution, coherent with the precepts of
freedom to use one's property as one sees best, is to let private
individuals decide how and when to metricate their businesses and
lives. The only exception I would make is noted above (public safety).
For the vast majority of the 15 or so million businesses in the
country, let them decide when and how to metricate. They know far
better than anyone what their individual circumstances are: how much
will they save by metricating? how much will it cost to metricate?
Manufacturers such as my own company have thousands and millions of
dollars of "tooling" and capital equipment. Let each one decide when
to metricate, based on the savings and costs of doing so, so as to
maximize the benefit (or minimize the net loss) of doing so.
If you read the editorial I had published in a couple of engineering
journals, you will see I make the point that the sooner a company
starts metricating, the fewer legacy products they will have to deal
with down the road. Using my own company as an example: back around
1990 or so we decided to start metricating. 15 years later we are
still selling products designed pre-metrication, but they are slowly
dropping in volume. We have largely replaced our non-metric tooling
(calipers, taps, drill bits, etc.) with metric ones. We still have
hundreds of pre-metrication drawings that are active, but every year
we have fewer.
If we had been forced to entirely metricate back around 1990, I am
sure it would have cost us a huge amount of money which we did not
have to spend by doing it over time.
As the pressure to metricate increases, each business owner will be
weighing the costs of metricating versus the costs of not
metricating. At some point they say "oh, it will be cheaper to
metricate," and will do so. Any outsider setting the timeline ensures
it is NOT done at the best time, given all the factors involved.
To summarize: for any outside party to simply mandate metrication
will almost guarantee a MORE expensive metrication process, since no
one knows all the billions of things affected by the metrication
process, while further imposing government regulation onto how
private parties can run their lives.
Not a very good deal, in my book.
Jim Elwell
Jim Elwell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
801-466-8770
www.qsicorp.com
