The Time of Our Lives

A week has passed, which is long enough for most of us to have adjusted to the annoying spring ritual of Daylight Savings Time. Even the stray cat that daily cadged food at my door all winter at 8 a.m. Eastern Savings Time (and not before) now shows up at 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time and not later. People (and apparently stray cats) are adaptable creatures, so why fuss about a simple clock change? Because the time change wreaks havoc on everything from personal health to train schedules, and it doesn’t accomplish the supposed goal of saving energy more than negligibly if at all. It’s not clear that it did anything useful back in 1916 when it was instituted as a wartime measure to conserve coal. Even if it did save a few lumps back then, which is uncertain, a wartime mandate to open schools, government offices, and factories an hour earlier would have served just as well. Today, anyone who might wish to make use of an earlier sunrise could get up earlier with or without changing the nominal time. Businesses can change their hours, too if they choose.

Older than I am, my wall clock has been
adjusted to DST 70 times and ST 69. It
never complains.

The negative effects of Daylight Savings are far from negligible. Most of them derive directly or indirectly from sleep deprivation. According to Popular Science workplace injuries rise 5.7% on the Monday after the switch. This is not matched by a decline when the clocks turn back in autumn. Fatal car crashes in the US rise 5.4% for the entire week after the springtime change as tired drivers make mistakes. There is a whopping 24% increase in heart attacks on the Monday after the start of DST but this is nearly balanced by a 21% drop on the Monday after the switch back to Standard Time, so we’ll call that one a wash. Try to avoid having a court date on the Monday after the start of DST though; cranky judges sentence convicts to 5% longer terms on that day. Crime rates drop slightly during DST, it is true, but this probably has nothing to do with the nominal time and everything to do with the natural phenomenon of more daylight hours that time of year. Darkness is simply better for crime, and there is less of it in spring and summer.

So why don’t we just give up on the whole idea? Inertia is the only plausible answer. It is hard for people to stop doing what they habitually do. It is why Americans stubbornly use English measurements despite metric having been official in the US (yes, it really is) since the Metric Act of 1866. Besides, Congress would have to act on abandoning DST, and Congress no longer can act on anything even in a bad cause much less a good one.

This is as good a place as any to absolve poor old Benjamin Franklin of the frequently heard charge of having come up with the idea for Daylight Savings. Ben was an early victim of Poe’s Law, which reads, “Without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.” In other words, no matter how obvious your satire might seem to you, someone will take you seriously. Franklin was joking.

The source of the charge is a letter written by Ben in the spring of 1784 to The Journal of Paris. Ben was in Paris as a diplomat for the fledgling United States. He and his companions (and, one may guess, the editors of The Paris Journal) enjoyed the nightlife. They went to bed late and arose late. In the letter he relates his remarkable discovery. One night, as usual, he “went home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight” but on this occasion neglected to close the shutters on the window. He was awakened at six o’clock by sunlight streaming through the un-shuttered window and thought it “extraordinary that the sun should rise so early.” He realizes the editors of the journal might be skeptical: “Yet it so happens, that when I speak of this discovery to others, I can easily perceive by their countenances, though they forbear expressing it in words, that they do not quite believe me.” After reiterating the truth of the matter, he goes on to explain how all that unused sunlight can be exploited, because “a discovery which can be applied to no use, or is not good for something, is good for nothing.” He estimates the number of candles used by 100,000 Parisian families at night and calculates that shifting their schedules earlier would save 96,075,000 livres in the six months between the spring and autumnal equinoxes: “An immense sum! that the city of Paris might save every year, by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.”

“All the difficulty will be in the first two or three days,” he opines, after which people would adjust. To help them make the adjustment he recommends imposing taxes on candles, regulations on candle shops, and fines on homeowners with closed shutters, while letting “cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest.”

I’ve heard sillier proposals, and (Nathan Poe’s admonition notwithstanding) not as satire.

The Chambers Brothers – Time Has Come Today