wrote in message
oups.com...
Many Americans are quite happy with metric units. Unfortunately, they
are subject to mandatory constraints. In a free market, many more
products in the supermarket would be labeled just in liters and grams.

Not if they wanted to sell them.

I'm sure that most people here realize why the US never adopted the metric
system for everything. Until the last couple of decades, and even now, in
fact, the US market is so self-contained compared to other developed
countries that the pressures European countries felt to adopt a uniform
system (the UK agreed kicking and screaming, and they still kick a little --
witness the pint/pub fiasco that was decided by the EU last week) never
existed here.

Without market and political pressures, and with the supposed "advantages"
of the metric system applying mostly to specialized areas, consumers and
much of manufacturing just did the most economic thing, which was to stand
pat. As the Europeans, Australians, etc. here likely know by now, the US is
fully metricized in those fields in which it provides an economic or other
substantial advantage. Once you move beyond the fields in which most use of
physical units is confined to linear dimensions or volumes, metrics dominate
in the US.

I was once a big advocate for metrics but decades of questioning its
advantages in the marketplace has led me to realize we're doing the thing
that provides the best economic result. The cost of converting would be far
greater, I believe, than the slight friction it adds to trade. If that
changes, we'll finish converting to metrics, but not until it pays to do so.

--
Ed Huntress