Daniel Immerwahr

So the U.S., despite the whole world having just agreed to do the yellow octagon, U.S.

is like, we're going to do red octagons now.

And so the U.S.

just starts doing red octagons.

And you just have to imagine the unbridled fury of traffic engineers worldwide as they're like, oh, God, we just did yellow.

And then eventually the world just catches up and does red because to play by a different system as the United States is going to be to court chaos, and in this case, traffic accidents.

And I had a research assistant, we worked together to run the numbers, and I think this is true.

If you look at where the red octagon currently is adopted as a stop sign, you are looking at countries that account for 91% of the world's population, including North Korea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you have to understand the power is cutting in two distinct ways.

So on the one hand, the things that the United States wants...

for itself, get adopted assiduously by other countries just as a way of like surviving and having economies that work.

On the other hand, the United States, unlike other countries, has the power to defy international standards.

And so the clearest example of this is the metric system.

So, I mean, one of the really extraordinary forms of standardization that happens globally is the internationalization of the metric system.

That is a France-centered operation, and it happens before the United States comes of industrial age.

But the United States is so powerful that it—not totally alone, but nearly alone among countries—feels no compulsion to adopt the metric system.

So it's just like, yeah, we work in pounds and inches.

Deal with it.

And so that's how you get a world where, for most people on the planet—