Yardstick Nation - by Hector Vera

About the Book

A provocative, interdisciplinary account of why the United States never adopted the metric system

Book Synopsis

Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its preference for practicality has not adopted the most practical, scientific, and innovative system of measurement? Yardstick Nation answers these questions by analyzing the political, economic, and international factors that determined the trajectory of the United States as a nation self-excluded from one of the most successful global technical languages.

Using a historical-comparative approach and qualitative analysis of archival material, the book examines the trajectories of American scientists, engineers, politicians, and industrialists from 1787 to 1982, to detail what they wanted to attain and to explain what was actually possible to achieve given the political and economic conditions in which they lived. Yardstick Nation argues that in order to understand the unbreached distance between the United States and the metric system, we must consider the interaction between three structural elements: historical timing, state infrastructural power, and international economic integration.

Author Hector Vera's systematic look at when and why countries have adopted the metric system shows that its introduction is never casual. In the countries that voluntarily embraced the metric system, this was the result of either deep internal political transformations or momentous changes in the international economy. When the adoption of the metric system is politically driven, it comes as the result of a social revolution, independence war, national unification, or the draft of a new constitution. When it is propelled by economic factors, metrication is part of the efforts of economically stagnant countries to integrate into international markets.

Review Quotes

"A remarkably ambitious intellectual project, Yardstick Nation highlights the odd fact that America, a political, technological, and commercial giant, is nevertheless the only country in the world other than Liberia and Myanmar that has thus far not metricized its system of weights and measures. Offering readers an exciting 'sociology of measurement, ' Hector Vera analyzes the social context within which systems of measurement are adopted or rejected, focusing on the social process by which our standard metric system has become an almost universal lingua franca. Yardstick Nation demonstrates that it is America's ambivalent attitude toward compulsory standardization and globalization, let alone aversion to centralization, that have thus far left it unmetricized. A superb socio-historical analysis of the political, cultural, and economic aspects of this fascinating chapter in the social history of measurement."
--Eviatar Zerubavel, author of The Seven-Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week

"Why is football played in yards and American pie weighed in ounces? Vera answers this question without resorting to some version of 'American exceptionalism.' This deeply researched and carefully argued study elucidates the historical events and political-economic conditions that prevented the metric system's adoption in the United States, even as it spread to the rest of the world."
--Gil Eyal, author of The Crisis of Expertise

"Vera convincingly shows how measurement systems are tied to the social, political, and economic life of their users, making Yardstick Nation not just the story of why the metric system failed to gain traction in America, but how it came to shape the rest of the globe. This book makes its case in clear and vivid prose."
--Ken Alder, author of The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World

About the Author

Hector Vera is a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).