The United States should adopt the Metric System

Finally, your claim that SI is not a superior system is not supported by evidence. That an English door remains 1981x762mm says nothing about SI and everything about the good decision to keep doors a standard size. Perhaps my statement was not clearly written. I make no claim that traditional units are superior to metric. Rather, both systems have their benefits and drawbacks. This can be illustrated very well by the medical industry. Measurements of height, weight, length and other basic measurements are taken using traditional units of measurement. However, medication is administered in milligram increments. In a scientific setting, there is no doubt that metric has key advantages. For everyday use, the vast majority of people prefer the traditional unit system. Even the youngest generation of adults in Britain who were raised on the metric system prefer the traditional system. Like I said before, superiority is entirely subjective. However, I would like to reiterate that simply converting old measurements into metric via a soft conversion is entirely obsolete compared to simple using the metric as the true standard. The point I think that you may have missed is that contrary to popular belief, many businesses and industries within the Britain use the Imperial system, and then convert to metric for legal purposes. One of the primary arguments used to promote the metric system is that time is saved in calculation. However, in many cases, just the opposite occurs due to the oppressive nature of the legal bureaucracy. "I also disagree that 120 is more easily divided using fractions than 100. What's 70 percent of 120? What's 34 percent of 100? For me at least the latter is a much simpler sum." Percentages are a far cry from everyday fractional use. You have, however, proved my point as far as the subject of subjectivity goes. In fact, the author of the article cited within your source (Jos. V. Collins) concedes the point that " 10 is inferior to 12 as a base for a notation for numbers". "The following numbers come from what seems to be the state of the art as far as research in this area goes. This paper cites many primary sources but I'll refer to it rather than its sources for simplicity's sake. It is citation [3]. In a 1915 lawsuit Jos. V. Collins some economists crunched the numbers and arrived at a total annual loss of $315 000 000.00 per year. [3] While still a large number today, adjusted for inflation this figure was $6 000 000 000.00 per year in 2005 dollars. [3]" I'm not sure what you mean by state of the art, but I will take it as implying that these sources are factually correct. On that point, I will strongly disagree. Joseph Collins was not court case, he was a professor who lived nearly a hundred years ago. Some of his assertions were fabricated for the sake of argument, and then these fabrications were used in order to "show" how much money the metric system could save. For example, this is how he "determined" how much labor could be saved by converting to metric: "Noting how much time is saved in making simple every-day calculations by using the metric system, suppose that we assume of the 60 or more millions of adults in active life in this country, on the average only one in 60 makes such calculations daily and that only twenty minutes' time is saved each day." He also goes on to claim that the traditional method of measurement is to blame for pencil biting, heartburn, arrested development, and highschool dropouts. He also makes several other heavy allegations without formally stating them. For example: "A committee of the National Educational Association has recently reported that Germany and France are each two full years ahead of us in educational achievement, that is, children in those countries of a certain age have as good an education as our children which are two years the foreign childrens' seniors. Surely one of these years is fully accounted for by the inferiority of our American arithmetic and spelling. This much, at least, of the difference is neither in the children themselves, nor in the lack of preparation of our teachers, nor in educational methods." One can only speculate as to how he so surely knew that our education system was a total mirror of Europe's', and that the only appreciable difference was that they used the metric system. While he never outright claims that there is a direct link, he smugly states: "There must be a reason." Some of his assumptions were demonstrably incorrect. The British public has never been in support of mandatory conversion, despite what he implies. "In a peer reviewed paper from 1992 Richard Phelps determined that the current practice of teaching two systems of measures results in a full year of teaching time lost to each student. I speculate that this is non-trivial. The author of a very informative summary paper concludes that based on our total educational expenditure this costs us over 8 billion dollars each year." I would have no problem with the school system teaching only one system of measurement. Such action does not at all force people to use one over the other. That being said, even if such action was to be taken, I would speculate that we would end up no better off than Britain, where despite having mandatory conversion, nearly 75 percent of the population prefers to use Imperial units for everyday measurement. "So the question is one of degree: how bad must the consequences be if we don't enact laws requiring metric compliance? If there were no consequences whatsoever nobody would want such laws: Without consequences laws are completely arbitrary. I would fight against a law making blue shirts illegal, for example. And I imagine so would most people." The problem I have with your analogy is that drunk driving deals a conflict of direct mortal safety while, metric conversion deals with financial benefit. If, for example, it could be empirically demonstrated that forcing all citizens to wear Western business satire would yield a 1 trillion dollar boost to our economy, I would want no part of it.