Why We Have Daylight Saving Time and Why We Should Scrap It: New at Reason

It’s time for Daylight Saving Time to go.

Andrew Heaton writes:

Yesterday was the start of Daylight Saving Time, and if anyone would like to form a SuperPAC to destroy politicians who jack around with my circadian rhythm I’ll gladly chip in a few bucks. The twice-annual timepiece adjustment is outdated and irritating. States should pick a time zone and commit.

Let’s first dispense with some of the myths behind Daylight Saving Time (DST). Many people assume we enacted DST to help farmers. That’s nonsense. Most of my relatives who aren’t in prison are farmers. I have no idea what time they wake up in the morning because whenever I visit they’ve already eaten lunch by the time I’m mixing a hangover cure. They rise before dawn to feed the cows, mow the corn, construct scarecrows, etc. All without directives from Congress.

Daylight Saving Time came about because of World War I. Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States all pushed our clocks forward to better coordinate waking hours with light bulb use, thereby conserving electricity. The program lapsed until World War II, when President Franklin Roosevelt instituted “War Time Zones,” which were basically the same thing, only with a cooler-sounding name. Astonishingly, despite originating as a temporary FDR government program, War Time Zones actually ceased at the conclusion of the war. Thereafter time zones defaulted to municipalities until 1966, when Congress enacted a permanent annual Daylight Saving Time, in part to standardize the plethora of discordant clocks across the nation.

Today all of these reasons are outdated. We probably won’t go to war with Germany again for another 20 or 30 years. And all of the economic benefits seem to cancel each other out. While we saved about 1 percent on electricity when first enacting DST, that figure is now offset by an increase in air conditioning. The idea that we’ll all revert back to discordant municipal time zones set by the sundial in our mayor’s front yard is utter nonsense. Everyone I know owns a smartphone, set automatically by a clutch of nerds in Cupertino.

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