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The legislation required most federal agencies to use the metric system in their procurement, grants, and other business-related activities by the end of 1992. [26] While not mandating metric use in the private sector, the federal government has sought to serve as a catalyst in the metric conversion of the country's trade, industry, and commerce.
One argument used by opponents of the metric system is that traditional systems of measurement were developed organically from actual use. [3] Early measures were human in scale, intuitive, and imprecise, as illustrated by still-current expressions such as a stone's throw, within earshot, a cartload or a handful.
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". [1] It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom: [2]
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The use of the metric system was made legal as a system of measurement in 1866 [165] and the United States was a founding member of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in 1875. [166] The system was officially adopted by the federal government in 1975 for use in the military and government agencies, and as preferred system for trade ...
The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 is an Act of Congress that was signed into law by U.S. President Gerald Ford on December 23, 1975. [1] It declared the metric system "the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce", but permitted the use of United States customary units in all activities.
The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), [1] named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.
In 1968, in the Metric Study Act (Pub. L. 90-472, August 9, 1968, 82 Stat. 693), Congress authorized a three-year study of systems of measurement in the U.S., with particular emphasis on the feasibility of adopting the SI. This detailed U.S. Metric Study was conducted by the Department of Commerce. A 45-member advisory panel consulted with and ...