Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.
Today is February 29th. Enjoy it. This is a leap year, which gives us an extra day every four years.
How about an extra week every six years, starting in 2020? That’s what you would enjoy if we
adopted the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar (HHPC). Faced with the Gregorian calendar’s plethora of problems, my colleague Dick Henry, a professor of astrophysics at The Johns Hopkins University, and I devised the HHPC. We propose Monday, January 1, 2018 as its start date.
The HHPC consists of 364 days broken into four identical quarters of 91 days, each containing two months of 30 days and one of 31. To account for calendrical drift and to maintain seasonal integrity, a leap weak (called Xtra Week) is added every six years at the end of the year. It is out of Xtra Week that the HHPC’s main feature arises: each day of the year is on the same day of the week, every year, forever. December 25th will be on a Monday, year-after-year. Take a look, and find your birthday. It will occur on the same day of the week, forever.
You might object to your birthday always falling on the same day of the week. Don’t worry. Celebrations can be set to any convenient day. The Queen of England officially celebrates her birthday in June, during the warm English summer, even though she was actually born on April 21st.
Why change from the Gregorian to the HHPC? After all, the Gregorian has been around since 1582. Well, there are a number of problems and inefficiencies associated with the Gregorian calendar. At present, to easily calculate interest on bonds, mortgages, and the like, there are a myriad of day count conventions. For an example, one requires us to assume that each month consists of 30 days and that each year is 360 days — the 30/360 day count convention. This can lead to huge errors in those months that are made up of 28 or 31 days. The HHPC eliminates the need for day-count conventions altogether.
Under the Gregorian calendar, the scheduling of holidays is also costlier than necessary.
The HHPC would allow the six existing Federal holidays to be scheduled on weekends, and it would also result in New Years’ Day falling on weekends. In the U.K., one study found that eliminating seven of these national holidays could save up to 1% of U.K. GDP annually. In the U.S., that would translate to savings of about $150 billion, or $480 per person, per year.
The benefits go on. All scheduling activities, for example, would be simplified. A school schedule would be set once, and last forever. Just think of the time that would be saved by scheduling sports leagues’ schedules once, instead of every year.
What are the odds that we wake up on January 1, 2018, and the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar has been adopted? I don’t know; they aren’t betting on it at Ladbrokes in London, not yet.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1oJo6Q6 Steve H. Hanke