Daylight spending more than you have
by David Zetland
Daylight spending more than you have
Some countries are changing their clocks this week while others will do so next week.
These changes are labeled “daylight saving” (DS) even though the number of daylight minutes stays the same. Marketing at its finest!
Indeed, there’s abundant evidence that this twice-annual ritual is useless or even harmful. As I’ve written before, it would be a triumph of global collective action to get rid of DS and even better to move the entire planet to one time (UTC) as a means of reducing numerous problems with time zones, at a cost of losing some anachronisms (“lunch at 12 noon” as opposed to “lunch at midday”).
But let’s look into the psychology and goals of DS.
First, are you saving an hour by setting the clock forward in the Spring and then spending that hour when you set it back in the Fall, OR are you borrowing an hour in the Fall and repaying it in the Spring? In either case, there’s zero interest paid or received in this +1 – 1 = 0 or -1 + 1 = 0 calculation. So that’s why the concept is a lie.
Second (and related), you can be sure that people are happier getting an extra hour of sleep or rest when the clock is set back (as it was just now in The Netherlands) than they are losing an hour when the clock is set forward. The psychology of loss aversion (mentioned in my recent post on Marshall’s Principles of Economics) explains this while also inspiring my new, improved DS:
Daylight Savings 2.0: Advance the clocks one hour per month, every month!
DS 2.0, thanks to government genius, will constantly leave everyone better off by adding an hour of rest or leisure not just once per year (and then taking it back!) by every month of the year!
DS 2.0 is like deficit spending, i.e., governments always spending more than they collect. Citizens love extra money so why not give them extra time!
And, yes, there might be quibbles over constantly changing clocks, but we have lots of “smart” technology these days to keep the time moving. Even more important, this ritual on the first weekend of every month would cause less confusion than the current irregular schedule just as it made everyone constantly aware of how time depends on where you are in geography as well as the calendar.
Maybe you think DS 2.0 is silly but so is DS, and both are based on faulty psychology more than efficiency or convenience.*
My one-handed conclusion is more free time is better!
Although the energy -saving justification is questionable in the modern economy, it is just silly to say the “daylight saving” was a lie. The idea was to ‘save” the early daylight hours that would otherwise be lost in sleep, thereby saving on illumination in the evening hours.
According to the 1950 World Almanac, New York Central Railroad stayed on standard time while the New Haven Railroad moved to daylight savings time. To help people catch their trains, the clocks in Grand Central Station were equipped with two hour hands.
http://www.kaleberg.com/built/show.php?name=e0419
Given that the daylight savings time adjustment meant that I’d see much less sunlight in the winter, I always assumed that daylight savings time was about cutting the wear and tear on the sun.