Dear Paul and All, Sorry for the delay in replying to your request for information. I have been a little busy as I am helping to manage the current election process for our Australian state of Victoria. This election involves compulsory voting for about 3 000 000 people on November 25 (next Saturday).
I have interspersed some remarks: On 16/11/06 6:36 PM, "Paul Armstrong" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> I remember reading a study that showed Imperial measurements as >>> producing significantly more waste than a similar project build using >>> Metric. In the 1970s, I was directly involved with the Australian building industry as they made their upgrade to metric units. At that time we estimated that each major building company and their sub-contractors, who made a quick clean metric transition, could expect to increase their gross profits by between 15 % and 20 % and their net profits by about 12 % as a direct result of their transition to metric. As an example, one of the companies that I worked with actually built two houses side-by-side one in imperial measures and the other in metric units. The waste was collected and taken away at the end of construction. The feet and inches house produced two and a half 5-ton truckloads of waste while the waste from the metric house did not fill a wheelbarrow. Every Australian building company has enjoyed the advantage of being metric since the mid-1970s and they will continue to gain from these profits indefinitely into the future. A gain of 12 % applied across an entire building industry is quite a lot of money so it struck me forcefully when similar figures were produced when the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conducted a survey of their members in about 1980 where they found similar savings (15 % of gross profits and 11 % of net profits). Both of these estimates are just that estimates but if these figures are approximately right, and we apply them across whole nations, in the same way as we have already used them across individual companies and whole industries, then we can estimate the cost of not using the metric system as being at least 10 % of gross domestic product (GDP). In the case of the USA, with an estimated gross domestic product of $11.75 G$/a, non-metric and mixed (metric and non-metric) businesses could be costing as much as 1.175 G$/a. To put this figure into newspaper language, I estimate that: It is costing the USA a little more than a trillion dollars a year not to be metric. (I have expanded on this idea in a pdf article called, 'Costs of not going metric' at http://www.metricationmatters.com/articles ) Based on a USA population estimate of 296 000 000, this is roughly 6015 dollars per person per year or about 16.50 $/day for each citizen of the USA. In the UK, with a GDP of 1.01 G£ and a population of 60 500 000 the overall savings would be about 152 M£/a; 2510 pounds per person per year; or 6.87 £/day for each citizen of the UK. And remember that the people of the UK and the USA will have to pay these amounts every day until they (inevitably) achieve metric only economies. I have no doubt that both nations will achieve a metric only economy; the current issue is not the question of will the UK and the USA 'Go metric' but how long they will take to do so. Currently, in both cases they have chosen the slowest possible pathways. A trillion dollars each year is a lot of money so obviously these figures seem outrageous. I would be most delighted to be proved wrong in my estimates. If you wish to check my figures, I based my calculations on estimated figures for GDP (2004) and population (2005) in the USA and UK taken from the CIA Factbook at: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html Cheers, Pat Naughtin PO Box 305, Belmont, 3216 Geelong, Australia Phone 61 3 5241 2008 Pat Naughtin is the editor of the free online monthly newsletter, 'Metrication matters'. You can subscribe at http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter Pat is recognised as a Lifetime Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist (LCAMS) with the United States Metric Association. He is also editor of the 'Numbers and measurement' section of the Australian Government Publishing Service 'Style manual for writers, editors and printers'. He is a Member of the National Speakers Association of Australia and the International Federation for Professional Speakers. See: http://www.metricationmatters.com This email and its attachments are for the sole use of the addressee and may contain information that is confidential and/or legally privileged. This email and its attachments are subject to copyright and should not be partly or wholly reproduced without the consent of the copyright owner. Any unauthorised use of disclosure of this email or its attachments is prohibited. If you receive this email in error, please immediately delete it from your system and notify the sender by return email.
