Hey, everyone.
Welcome to Uno Dose of Trace.
I am Trace.
Daylight savings time is based on a false assumption.
We do this every year where we spring forward
and we fall back, and we spring forward and we fall back.
But we could just stop.
We should just stop.
We just switched from daylight savings time to standard time.
And not only does switching from summertime to regular time
make life more difficult and more complicated,
there's evidence that it literally kills people.
California voted to abolish daylight savings,
and to that I say no thank you, sir, madam, people.
I say no because standard time is terrible.
The sunset on the summer solstice,
the longest day of the year, would be 735 PM.
That sounds terrible for summer.
Ugh, no, no, no.
Instead, let's just keep daylight savings time forever,
endless summer time.
If we adopt daylight savings forever,
it is always later later, always.
It's just sometimes dark earlier.
There are a bunch of arguments for daylight savings,
and I'm going to go through each one.
And some of them go back centuries,
but they're all pretty much wrong.
And I'm going to tell you why they're wrong,
and also why we should just stop doing this to ourselves.
So get ready to alohamora all of these arguments.
That didn't make any sense.
Hey there, second law of thermodynamics.
This is Trace here, and I've been
thinking about daylight savings for a while.
Happy Halloween, by the way.
That's why I'm in costume.
I've got to go to a Halloween party later.
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And thank you.
Daylight savings is a result of our creation of time.
Time is a construct.
We invented it, it doesn't actually exist.
Yeah, yeah, time passes, second law of thermodynamics.
Everything increases in entropy on our inevitable march
toward the heat death of the universe.
But seconds, minutes, hours, these concepts
were created to make society run smoother and more efficiently.
They're not constant.
In ancient Rome, they recognized that the days
were longer in the summer, so they just made hours
longer to accommodate for that.
A Roman summer hour was 75 minutes
and a winter hour was only 45 minutes.
Like all human things, our approximations of nature
are imperfect.
And today we adopt daylight savings time, or summer time,
to approximate a solution for the same problem.
The days are longer in the summer.
The reason of this is the earth.
The northern hemisphere summer seems
longer because of the tilt of the earth as we orbit the sun.
The Earth's movement in space also
contributes to the shifting of sunset and sunrise
over the year.
Our chasing of the sun around the clock
was first suggested by Ben Franklin,
but it was never implemented by him.
You're probably thinking that we switched time
because of some ancient or old agrarian society thing, right?
Farmers, argh.
But that's actually a big myth.
Full time farmers don't need to move time around.
And in fact, in 1919 when daylight savings was
first adopted--
it was later repealed, we're going
to come back to that-- farmers were against it.
Moving the clock actually harms farmers.
Because if you milk the cows at 5:00 AM and then we fall back,
it's 4:00 AM and the cows still want
to be milked at that same time.
Them cows still need milking, so the dairy farmer just
has to get up earlier to milk them cows.
That's the way it goes.
So if it's not farmers, why do we do this?
Capitalism.
But to get to that takes a minute,
so we have to go back to the late 19th century
when we stopped using sun time and we
switched into standard time.
For most of our history, clocks were not
synced with each other.
Instead, some person set the clock in the center of town
to noon or rang the town bell so we could all set our watches.
When the sun was right overhead, that was noon.
This means each town had its own time.
It was called sun time--
or God's time in the US, no surprise there.
This time was different everywhere.
Every town at different latitudes and longitudes
would have a different noon, and thus a different time of day.
This is an 1870 pocket diary that
includes how to convert Boston time to other places.
A Bostonian heading to Detroit, for example,
would subtract 47 minutes and 56 seconds
from their watch to be on Detroit time.
The state of Wisconsin had 38 different times.
And I'm sure this would be very confusing
if you were traveling around Wisconsin trying
all the cheese.
But in the 19th century, that wasn't too much of a problem
because we didn't have a society that relied on specific meeting
times, like down to the minute or to the second.
There were no tight deadlines like that.
But as trains and faster modes of transportation
were invented, we needed a better, more standardized way
to measure time.
And there was push-back, but eventually governments
adopted a standard time.
And this was a huge shift for humanity as a whole.
We divested ourselves from the sun.
We created this imperfect time system separate from nature,
and we were running into problems.
Under sun time, the sun's position
was determining noon every day.
It was literally noon.
And throughout the year, the length of the day would change
and we'd move noon around, keeping in sync
with the length of the day.
The middle of the day would still be the middle.
But without that movement, we started to have problems.
And for the first time in history,
the sun was out of sync with how we were living our lives.
A British builder named William Willett noticed on a morning
horse ride, allegedly, that people were
sleeping when the sun was up.
And like a lot of annoying morning people he was all like,
I don't get it.
Wake up and do something.
He felt that we needed to shift the hour to wake people up.
This was called Willett's summer time.
He pitched it to Parliament, and it
would encourage the British people to get up and be
more active and outdoorsy.
And Parliament rejected it.
Turns out, governments don't really
care about people being active.
But they do care about money.
When Brent Franklin suggested daylight savings time,
he thought if it were lighter later we
would burn fewer candles and save on energy.
During World War I, Germany established a summer shift
to do exactly that, burn less fuel.
Allegedly, they wanted to save energy,
so they would shift the clock.
And once they passed it, Britain did too.
And so did other European countries and the United
States.
I'm sure Willett would have been very pleased.
And this was the first adoption of daylight time.
As I mentioned earlier it was repealed after the war.
During World War II, we all adopted it again,
and it expired six months after the war ended.
No one wanted daylight savings time.
Throughout the following decades,
daylight savings was tried a few more times,
like during the oil embargo to save energy in the '70s.
And selectively, by some states and towns,
each area started and ended daylight savings time
on different days.
Or they just ignored it, making things very confusing
for train scheduling and for TV broadcasters.
Every region still had its own weird time.
Until in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which
said if you adopt summertime, it has
to be from April to October.
That's when it was.
It was either an up or down vote.
And they did this to keep it simple,
but also to save energy.
The US Department of Transportation
says today on their website, energy consumption
is the purpose of daylight savings.
It saves energy.
But what if I told you the whole energy saving
thing, the 18th century Ben Franklin assumption,
that actually doesn't save any energy.
A 2008 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research
found that daylight savings time actually, quote,
"increases residential electricity demand".
And in the fall, it increases it the most, by 2% to 4%.
Another study in Australia found the same result, no energy
savings.
They were able to do this because,
until 2006 Indiana didn't use daylight savings time.
So the researchers looked at how much
energy people were using before summertime adoption and then
after.
And it turns out, lighter later doesn't really save energy.
And they say in the study that places further south of Indiana
might have worse energy consumption using
daylight savings time.
It might be worse in the south.
If the whole premise is wrong, then why do we still do this?
Capitalism, my friends.
Saving energy is a red herring.
It doesn't matter if it's real or not.
But another major reason for adopting daylight savings time
is being more active, right?
We'll be outside more.
We have altered daylight savings time multiple times
since 1966 when it was adopted.
The most recent one was the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
We made daylight savings time longer,
stretching it from early March until early November.
Why is that?
Because of shopping.
Retailers lobbied Congress hard to extend daylight savings
in the 2000's because later sunset times encouraged people
to visit stores and restaurants, and they allegedly
would spend money.
The Department of Transportation says
they want to make people more active, i.e.
they want people to go out and do things.
And what do people do when they go out?
In the US at least, they spend dollars.
But to be honest, this isn't a thing either.
Consumer spending does increase slightly
after the spring daylight savings time shift,
but the drop after the fall shift actually outweighs it.
So there's still no real reason to do this.
The third reason the Department of Transportation website,
and another commonly cited reason
to keep daylight savings time, is reduction in crime.
Some say that daylight savings reduces
crime and sexual assault because fewer people are out
in the dark of the evening.
You know, it's dark, so crime happens.
And a study in the Review of Economics and Statistics
from 2015 found during daylight savings,
when it is lighter later in the evening,
robberies are reduced by 7%.
They also looked at rape, and aggravated assault, and murder.
But they didn't find a statistical significance
with any of those, although there were suggestions of it.
So energy savings, no not so much.
Consumption, no not so much.
Activity, we're not actually more active.
We do drive more, causing more fuel use and pollution,
but we don't buy more stuff.
So no.
It's not just that there's not a benefit.
Switching the clock is actively harming us.
When we lose an hour of sleep or shift our sleep schedule,
that hour comes out of our sleep somehow.
In the spring of especially, right?
You either go to bed earlier, you wake up later,
you feel groggy.
Things just don't match up.
We're more like the cows in the farmers example.
We need to be milked at the same time every day,
no matter what actual time it is.
It takes us many weeks to get over this.
And this has real economic effects.
Studies, lots of them, show DST related
sleep deprivation causes more traffic crashes, workplace
injuries, lower productivity, poorer stock market trading.
And here's the kicker, it could actually kill you.
A Finnish study found an 8% increase in stroke
the days after the switch.
And here in the overworked and underslept U-S of A,
there is a 24% increase in heart attack
risk the Monday after daylight savings
time begins in the spring.
In the fall, the extra hour of sleep
results in a 21% reduction in heart attack
risk, which is great.
But falling back isn't that better.
It still messes with our sleep schedules,
causing problems that reverberate
through the rest of our lives.
Now I'm not the first person to come to this conclusion,
but let's put all this together.
If this is actively harming us, you know the switching
back and forth, and there are no consumption, energy,
or activity bonuses, then why shift the clock back and forth
at all?
I say, don't.
I say, adopt daylight savings time forever.
My suggestion, endless summer time.
You're ready for this?
Now I'm a Ravenclaw, so I've thought this through.
Instead of falling back next year, we just don't.
It's lighter later all year round.
Let's use DC as an example, because it's
at a middle latitude.
On average, the sun sets in DC at 5:16 PM in the winter
and 8:31 PM in the summer.
If we sprung forward and we never fell back,
it would be lighter later in the winter.
The sun wouldn't set until 6:16 PM.
People might even be out of work by then.
With permanent daylight savings, people would get out of work
and they might still be able to see daylight or twilight.
There are downsides to this, of course, later sunrises.
So at the winter solstice-- it's the shortest day of the year--
go to Seattle, the high latitude,
and you would see an 8:55 AM sunrise, which is not the best.
I warrant that.
But morning twilight, which is when it starts getting light,
that's at 7:00 AM.
So it's not dark at 8:00 AM.
It's just-- the sun isn't above the horizon yet.
It's a compromise.
Another downside bar, if you will.
I'm not actually a parent yet, but lobbying groups
argue that abolishing daylight savings time or adopting
endless summer time would mean kids
might be waiting for the bus to go to school in the dark.
And that's not great.
I totally see, also not great.
But there's a solution for that, later school start times.
Literally everyone wants this.
There's lots of research that says
kids learn better, are more attentive,
and get better grades with later start times.
And if you pick the right one, they're
not waiting in the dark.
Endless summer time, later start times,
this sounds like a utopia.
Legaled, end school bar.
So daylight savings, we do it now because of assumptions
and historical precedent.
But we have light later at night and we
get all the benefits and fewer of the failures
if we just stop switching.
Switching time costs money, and productivity, and health care,
and car crashes.
Even the computer systems we have
to build to accommodate for the switch,
and the record keeping to make sure
that we know whether this was the first 1:30
AM or the second 1:30 AM.
All of that costs money and time.
We're living in summer time already
now from March to November.
We only use standard time for a third of the year.
And it just seems like by the time you get used to it,
it's over.
So why not just get rid of it?
It's worth a try, right?
Let's spring forward one last time and never fall back.
One more quick thought.
What about double daylight savings?
You know double, sunsets at 10:30 PM,
you could be out forever.
More on that in the Easter egg in the description.
What do you think of all this?
Would you rather keep daylight savings forever?
Abolish it?
Just keep doing what we're doing now?
What do you guys think?
Let me know.
Thank you so much for watching.
I really hope you learned something.
I know that I did while researching it.
I'm Trace, and I will see all you muggles in the future.