Dear Victor,
Thanks for your comments. I have interspersed some remarks.
On 2008/11/19, at 6:05 AM, Victor Jockin wrote:
I don't think citing the $1 trillion figure will help our cause,
because it's not a credible figure.
With respect to whether my estimate of more than a trillion dollars
will 'help our cause' I am aware that many people hold a contrary view
that metrication 'will cost trillions'. I have heard this viewpoint
from many people, including politicians, but at no point have I found
any material support for this view; I regard 'it will cost trillions'
as simply an unsupported assertion. I suppose that in some sense I was
reacting to the 'it will cost trillions' fallacy when I wrote the
article 'Cost of non-metrication in the USA'.
As you will have read in my article at http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CostOfNonMetrication.pdf
I based my estimate of a trillion dollars on a survey of industry
done by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in 1980. Their
survey compared metric companies with non-metric companies and
partially metric companies. For your information, the CBI represented
the largest British companies at that time. Their conclusions included
the estimate that it cost an additional 9 % of turnover to be non-
metric and it reduced net profits by about 14 %.
There are certainly costs, borne internationally. But the entire
annual GDP of the US is only $14 trillion.
As you will have read in my article, I wrote:
With reference to the USA, if you take the cost estimates from items 1
and 3 and make a bold, but not wild, assumption that it costs about 9
% of gross turnover to use dual measurements (metric and U.S.
Customary) then based on a 2005 estimated Gross Domestic Product for
the USA of $12.735 trillion dollars it costs the USA about 1.15
trillion dollars per year to use dual measures.
If I use your updated figure of 14 trillion dollars the estimated cost
becomes greater at about 1.26 trillion dollars.
The analysis related to education costs is pretty questionable.
There would be some recalibration of lesson plans if US customary
units went away, and maybe a little time to teach something else,
but the total dollars flowing into education would likely not change.
As you know, this is not my conclusion but that of Richard Phelps. You
can view Richard P. Phelps' complete article after you register on the
Education Weekly database at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1992/12/09/14phelps.h12.html
but you can see this quotation without registering on the web site
as it is on the front page:
'It (USA education system) teaches two systems of measurement in the
schools and, the confusion from learning two systems aside, there is a
cost to the time spent in teaching two systems. A full year of
mathematics instruction is lost to the duplication of effort.'
Figures for industrial costs from 1915 are also not very
informative; a lot has changed in the US since then, including the
metrication of medicine and many US products and industries. If
there really a lot of money to be made converting, market forces fix
that, as happened in the US auto industry.
You are probably right about the relevance of the 1915 figures but
these appear to me to be the most recent figures available that try to
honestly assess how much it costs the USA not to be metric. This is a
very badly researched area where many, perhaps most, people settle for
the unsupported conjectures like: 'It will cost trillions' or
'Converting to metric will cost lots' but this is a simplistic
conjecture has been disproved in all nations of the world that have
openly adopted metric units as well as all companies in the USA that
have adopted metric units (although these are often hidden) .
I suspect much of the expense we bear today stems from the
cumulative impact of tiny incremental costs on a range of products
that are sold internationally; all those separate speedometer dials,
product labels, Fahrenheit thermometers, and redubbed science shows
on TV, remade especially for us. Pennies here and there are passed
on to consumers, and over the scale of the US economy, it adds up to
real money. Some of the other factors in this analysis, like lost
orders, etc., are also probably real. But it's not 7% of GDP.
To get a feel for the correct percentage to use you could time how
long it takes you to subtract 140 millimetres from 180 millimetres as
these are the design and build measurements for the motor bike in this
video. Then watch this video again while you calculate how long it
takes four men to do the same calculation using old pre-metric
colonial measures — http://youtube.com/watch?v=Omh8Ito-05M
For me, it took less than 5 seconds to calculate 180 — 140 = 40
millimetres
And it took ten minutes for 4 men, at mechanics rates of pay, to do it
the old way.
The comparison is 5 seconds for metric vs 600 seconds for colonial
fractions — an increase of 12 000 %.
(By the way, I concede that this is a television series that
exaggerates its storylines, but while this is true, similar
occurrences are happening in many other industries every day — and at
similar costs. — to me 9 % of turnover is not an unreasonable figure.)
Then you could think about the complete loss of NASA's Mars Climate
Orbiter before you answer the question: What percentage of 125 million
dollars is 125 million dollars?
As I said previously, the estimate I used was 9 %, and this also
seemed reasonable to me from my experience in the Australian
construction industry where we estimated that costs dropped by about
10 % when builders and their sub-contractors adopted the metric
system, in the 1970s, and they have been enjoying that increase in
profits every year since then.
As you sound quite confident that a trillion dollars is not
'credible', might I assume that you have calculated a better figure. I
would appreciate it if you shared it with us as well as your method of
calculation.
Cheers and thanks again for the chance to reconsider some of these
issues,
Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia
From: Pat Naughtin
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 1:31 AM
To: U.S. Metric Association
Subject: [USMA:41981] A trillion dollars
Dear All,
As most of you know, I sometimes refer to the article Cost of non-
metrication in the USA (http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CostOfNonMetrication.pdf
) where I estimate that not using the metric system costs the USA a
bit over a trillion dollars each year.
However, I am also well aware that '1 trillion dollars' is
impossible to bring to mind as it is far too big a number.
Here is a reference where Rob Simpson has made an attempt to make
the concept of '1 trillion dollars' real. He does this by estimating
what you could buy with '1 trillion dollars'. The dot points at the
bottom of the page open to reveal the estimates for each area of
public expense or you can go on a '1 trillion dollar' spending spree
(theoretically of course).
You will find the reference at http://www.whatwecouldhavedonewiththemoney.com/
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the
modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they
now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for
their businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many
different trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial
and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA.
Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST,
and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com
for more metrication information, contact Pat at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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