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Amongst all the rationalizations I miss the one thing that is typical for the US as a young immigrant nation with little history: a desperate need to cling to a
by santacluster 12y ago
Amongst all the rationalizations I miss the one thing that is typical for the US as a young immigrant nation with little history: a desperate need to cling to any kind of custom or tradition to create a sense of identity. Especially if those customs set them apart from the rest of the world.
This goes well beyond the metric system. In many ways the US is extremely old-fashioned in the eyes of other Westerners, clinging to customs most of us have abandoned many decades ago. Unless there is a clear economic advantage in it, the US is strongly resistant to change for fear of diluting its still relatively young and shallow identity.
On typical form of American deflection is coming up with elaborate explanations why what works for other countries won't work for America. Sometimes these exceptionalist arguments are not entirely untrue (the US is an exceptional nation in many ways), but they become really transparent when they try to argue why other countries are different. (Most of those arguments just show a willful cultural ignorance, especially remarkable when coming from well-educated and well-traveled Americans.)
No, for the US there is no compelling economic reason to go metric. But that's not the reason why it doesn't, that's just the rationalization du jour. Any other country would not be afraid to adopt the simple convenience of joining the rest of world in a single standard.
- adventured 12y agoClinging to customs is definitely a common human trait. I don't see anything special about the US doing it. For example Europe clings to one of the most absurd customs of all: large numbers of unnecessary languages. Instead of standardizing, countries in Europe go out of their way to preserve extreme inefficiency in communication. So there's Europe, not a young world, desperately clinging to languages to hold on to tradition and supposedly culture. If it's important to standardize measurement, it must be dramatically more important to standardize on language. Why does Europe have three dozen major languages in use? Half of Europe shares no common language, with only 50% of people there speaking English. The only thing that would make sense, is to standardize on English, Spanish or perhaps Mandarin (it doesn't make as much sense as the other two for Europe). I see non-stop talk about how the US should adopt the metric system, and I completely agree because it makes logical sense. And Europe should abandon all of their languages and adopt English - let's see which happens first.
- TimJRobinson 12y agoThey are standardizing on English. I recently moved to the Netherlands and only speak English and 99% of people I've met speak English. Nearly all meetups and tech conferences in western Europe are also done in English. Also almost the entire world uses metric, it would really suck if everyone in the entire world spoke English except for the country you grew up in.
- adventured 12y agoThe countries in Europe with a high % of English language use, are simultaneously maintaining their old languages. For example the Netherlands are keeping Dutch, and Sweden is keeping Swedish. It'd be like arguing the US is standardizing on metric, while still commonly using imperial, keeping both would be extremely inefficient and pointless. I believe language standardization is more important than measurement standardization, and yet, again, half of Europe has no common language. Somehow language gets treated with special kid gloves, because it's supposedly an important tie to culture. I completely reject that claim as being any more valid than trying to claim imperial is an important tie to culture and thus should be preserved. Only about 35% of people in France speak English; for Italy it's sub 30%; Spain is only 22% or so. And this isn't fluency, it's the % of people with any meaningful knowledge of English. The rate of moderate fluency would be far lower.