Why Americans don't use metric

[aragusea]

***NOTE: I would ask folks watching this video to be mindful of which arguments I'm making, versus which arguments I'm merely relaying to you. Most of this video consists of me and Dr. Mihm explaining other people's arguments, not making our own.

Q: Why do you hate the metric system??
A: I don't! I think it's great! Watch the whole video! Even if it wasn't great, I would still be all for my country adopting metric, purely in the service of getting us all on a single global standard.

Q: Dr. Mihm says the U.S. was the biggest economy in the world by the 1870s. Some other sources say it wasn't until the 1920s. What gives?
A: You can calculate the size of an economy lots of different ways, and you'll get slightly different results. But Dr. Mihm is hardly the only scholar to say this happened in the late 19th century, rather than the early 20th. I believe he's going by gross domestic product adjusted for purchasing power (GDP-PPP).

Q: Is this really a cooking video?
A: I've decided that, going forward, this channel will be dedicated to food topics and immediately food-adjacent topics. I would consider this a food-adjacent topic. I will likely start a second channel in the next year or so dedicated to things that have nothing to do with food. I hope you'll subscribe!

Q: Why did you get political at the end there? Isn't this a cooking channel?
A: I have no desire to shoehorn politics into this channel. I don't think that's what you come here for, and I have no desire to needlessly alienate some viewers. But sometimes food and food-adjacent topics intersect directly with politics, and there's no intellectually honest way to avoid talking about it. Metric adoption is a political issue.

Q: Did you get new glasses?
A: No, I found my old glasses! It would seem a child stuck them into a low shelf. They've been missing for a year.

Q: Why did you show a picture of the Mexican flag when discussing the Spanish language, rather than the Spanish flag?
A: Because I was discussing the Spanish that I learned in high school, which was Mexican Spanish. Strikes me as pretty logical for U.S. schools to favor Mexican Spanish dialects!

Q: Why are you so confident that globalization is, on balance, a good thing?
A: Globalization has done many things, many of them terrible. I could talk about how it has probably lifted literally billions of people out of extreme poverty, etc, but for me it's pretty simple: Literally anything is better than WWIII, and economic interdependence of the world's great powers has made WWIII a lot less likely.

[niallsulcer]

When it comes to adopting the metric systems, American drug dealers truly are trail blazers.

[Audiojack_]

I use the universally applicable measuring system of "that looks about right."

[OnboardG]

The most British thing is to look at a boundary and say “I think the fence for that needs to be six feet tall and three metres long”.

[mothrfckr-sn]

I grew up with the metric system, but after living for a few years in not the US, but Canada, I had to become somewhat unit bilingual. Canada might officially be metric, but they're having a hard time letting go. All the recipes were imperial, and for cooking temperatures they use Fahrenheit, but for temperature in other contexts they use celsius. Doing construction and electrical work, everything was imperial. I had to get used to feet and inches. All the weights at the gym were in pounds. No one knows what you're talking about if you tell them you are 175cm tall and weigh 70kg. My Alberta drivers licence had my height in cm, but the lady at the registry converted to feet and inches to make sense of it. So its really dumb when people make out like the US are the only hold outs.

[ATaylor]

I would like to thank my 5 years as a drug dealer for helping me master the metric system.

[schmules]

MYTH: In the UK we measure speed using miles per hour. This is a LIE: we actually measure it in furlongs per fortnight

[JudsonCc]

I found myself increasingly using metric in the kitchen for a very lazy reason: I can wash fewer dishes if I'm weighing things in a big mixing vessel as I add them instead of using a bunch of cups and spoons. And I use grams because of the increased precision (my old scale only used to do 1/8's of an ounce and very imprecisely at that). I'll do nearly anything if it requires washing fewer dishes.

[HedgehogStudios]

I live in California. I started learning metric in sixth grade. My computer hardware has always reported its temperature in Celsius. The 3-D printer I got several years ago is completely metric. About a year ago, I got into coffee brewing and everything there is done in grams. I never sought out metric measurements. They just kind of happened, and honestly I don’t mind

[real-oppenheimer]

"metric is so small compared to imperial"
That's the kicker, I can easily transform 500g to 0.5 kg in my head. And that works for nearly all other units as well.

[georgH]

I do appreciate when people take the extra mile to give us, non-Americans, quantities in metric. Thank you 😉

[jimmymifsud]

In the industrial setting, for any size in between 1/2 1/4 1/8 etc it becomes incredibly difficult to work out in between sizes.

Metric is 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16mm etc

[rossn]

"We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke." - Great Britain

[acck]

It's incredibly interesting that federally we DO operate on the metric scale. The Army and Marine Corps adopted the metric system in 1957 which is actually BEFORE Great Britain adopted it in 1965. The navy generally measures in nautical units for distance and speed so neither metric or imperial. When you hear military personnel use the word "click" as in "The target is 4 clicks out." They're referring to Kilometers. 1 Kilometer is 1 click. Our ammunition is standard 5.56mm, 7.62mm, and 9mm. All metric. Artillery rounds are generally 155mm or 120mm rounds. When we go to the range to qualify with a rifle we're shooting at targets at distances measured in meters.


Also in 1988 congress passed the "Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act" which mandated that all federal business be conducted in the metric system by 1992.



As far as the federal government is concerned we ARE a metric country. The imperial system really just lives on as a relic of society and culture rather than some government mandate since the entire federal government operates on the metric system not the imperial system of measurements.

[sonicpsycho]

I'm an American engineer working in manufacturing for the automotive industry. All of the car parts we design and make, as well as all of the tools we design are done completely in metric.

American automakers switched to metric decades ago as they started selling more cars in foreign markets. Rather than have separate catalogs of parts in inch and metric, they just decided to reduce costs and make all of their cars metric.

The machine shops whom we order tools from operate in inches, but they use inches in decimal form, rather than fraction - i.e. thousandths of an inch.

[RadiusFive]

Coming to the US, it took me a while to realize that cups and spoons were not what I had in my kitchen cupboards and drawers, but actual units of measure with precise meaning.

[cassandralesh]

The automotive industry went metric in the 80's
My husband is a automotive technician and almost all of his tools are metric. Even drill bits and taps. He blames carpenters and plumbers for America not switching to metric.

[NiklasRi]

5:35 i think that really just depends on what you grew up with. If you grew up with the metric system estimating what 500g of flour is, is the same as estimating what one pound of flour is if you are used to the imperial system.
Same with temperaure. I often hear Americans say that Fahrenheit is more intuitive because you know that 100°F is a really hot summer day. However if youre used to Celsius you still know that its a hot day if the thermometer says its 37°C. There is no difference.

If i wanted to go in with this there would be more examples (french numbers... 99 is spelled like 4 * 20 + 19 but because they did it their whole life for them its just intuition)

[ciangargan]

I live in Ireland. It's like listening to a different language when I watch American cooking shows. There are so many different units of weight and volume.

[thux]

Just like how some fields have organically gone metric, if metrification were legislated, the change will not immediately affect some fields. In Australia, we went metric in the 1970s, yet most people still talk about human height in feet and inches.