Who's Saving What Exactly? All About Daylight Savings Time
A deep dive into the yearly hassle
Every week I go to call my parents and have to ask myself, “Are they on weird time or normal?”
That’s because I live in Taiwan, a country that stopped using DST way back in 1979, and my parents reside way over the ocean blue in Canada. Normal time for me is a 12-hour shift in the time zones, weird time is 13.
Not a big deal, but if you’re reading this today lacking a precious hour of sleep from the time change on the weekend, did you ever wonder why we have this odd ritual affecting our lives in the first place?
I did, and spent half a day figuring it out so you never have to.
What Exactly Is Daylight Savings Time?
To start off, some of you keen observers probably took issue with that subheader above this line. Why? Because it’s officially called Daylight saving time (DST), with no “s”.
Around the world where this weird practice is still used, the time change goes by names such as:
Daylight Time
Summer Time
War Time (Thanks to the Department of Defense reinstating it in WWII)
In the modern age, Daylight saving time typically means our clocks are set forward one hour sometime in the spring, and one hour back in the fall.
I’m sure most of you have heard the old adage, “Spring forward. Fall back.”
And while that might make a good title for a new exercise course guaranteeing 6-minute abs, it just refers to adding an hour in the spring and removing one in the fall.
But what’s the science behind it?
Well, that’s due to Earth’s off-kilter rotation being responsible for the seasonal shifts in the length of daylight.
This leads to three main points:
The Earth rotates on its axis at a 23.4° angle relative to its path around the sun.
While the Equator usually has around 12 hours of both day and night throughout the year, the same isn't true for regions further north or south.
How much an area’s daylight changes depends, in part, on how far the location is from the Equator.
During summertime in the Northern Hemisphere, things really start to heat up as we lean toward the sun. This causes longer and warmer days that are perfect for enjoying the great outdoors.
On the flip side, the Southern Hemisphere experiences shorter days of winter as it tilts away from the sun. And of course, in six months' time the situation reverses, and winter grips the North while the South experiences longer daylight hours.
Great! Now we know what it’s called and why we have winters and summers. Class is over…right?
Sorry kids, not yet.
First, we have to figure out why the hell we actually have daylight saving time in the first place.
Why Do We Use Daylight Saving Time?
It’s the farmers, right?
Oddly, quite the opposite.
The idea goes that farmers wanted more daylight to tend to their hoes and increase productivity throughout the summer. Or Big Goat wouldn’t stop bleating to congress about their kids being able to work longer hours and still go to school.
But in reality, the farming lobby was one of the biggest opponents of DST in the first place.
Imagine telling a farm animal to wait an extra hour to be milked in the morning (probably not the chickens).
Or asking the local markets to change how they do business because of an arbitrary time change.
Or asking the morning dew to change its physics.
Most farmers simply don’t enjoy the “benefits” of having to change their clocks twice a year.
Their intensive efforts led the US government to repeal DST after WWI in the Versailles Treaty, even while other industries (like retail stores and even golf!) pushed to keep it.
But then came WWII.
Pearl Harbor had just been attacked, Singapore was in the midst of falling, and the general vibe of the times wasn’t so good for the western allies.
So, what’s a world leader to do when their country’s morale is flailing?
Make a “difference” in the average citizen’s life!
On Feb. 9, 1942, President Roosevelt enacted Daylight Saving Time across all 5 time zones of the USA, ostensibly to conserve energy and help every citizen contribute to the war effort.
Why would an extra hour of daylight help conserve fuel?
Essentially, because you wouldn’t need electricity, powered by coal, to light your houses for that one hour. Over in Britain, they had the added benefit of giving workers an extra hour to run home before the Blitz blackouts started.
So, now we have a few general reasons for why governments enacted it, but where did these ideas even come from in the first place?
This is a free version of Pryor Thoughts, because they all are.
But just in case you want to help keep this newsletter running:The Strange History of Daylight Saving Time
We probably have Benjamin Franklin to thank (or blame?) for DST. Way back in 1784, BF was the first American diplomat to France. And being a snarky polymath who was beholden to late nights by candlelight, penned a satirical piece to his friend who later published it.
Apparently, Parisians had a reputation for enjoying life a bit more than we do today, often going to bed at 4 am and sleeping until noon. (I think I know where I want to live next.)
Franklin was no stranger to this, noting one day after waking up at 6 am to a loud noise, that he was shocked the sun had the audacity to show up that early.
In his postulations on how to solve such a conundrum, he lamented that if Parisians slept through 6 hours (6 Am to Noon) of daylight, they’d therefore spend 6 extra hours at night using millions of precious candles and lamp oil.
His humorous solutions included:
Every window with shutters should be taxed
Candles should be rationed going forward
Guards should be posted on the street stopping almost all traffic after daylight
Every sunrise should come alongside church bells and cannon blasts
So, what started as a complete riff on lazy people sleeping in became the spark of an idea that idiots carried forward two centuries later.
But a few more pokes of the bear helped spur on the idea.
Next came a Kiwi named George Hudson in 1884, who advocated for two hours of daylight to be added so that he—an entomologist—could collect more bugs in the summer sunshine.
Seems…fair for the rest of society?
Then jump over to the UK in 1907, and a millionaire named William Willet also noticed how damn lazy everyone is. He spent a small fortune trying to convince parliament of his life-changing scheme, even having an elaborate pamphlet produced called The Waste of Daylight.
Less than a year later, back in my neck of the world, a man named John Hewitson wanted people to enjoy an extra hour of sunlight in the scenic Ontario town of Port Arthur where he resided.
So many lazy people. So little daylight. So few senses of humor.
And then came WWI, where federal governments instituted it for the first time across their swaths of land. The practice was then repealed and reintroduced several times depending on the country, but in the US, after WWII, each state was left to decide whether or not it was beholder to DST.
To stop all of the state-crossing time-confusion, the Uniform Time Act was implemented in 1966, which standardized the timing for any states that wanted to use it.
So now, we have a piece of comedy written to spark the idea, then a bunch of rich old white men who thought everyone else was lazy, and then wartime leaders with the desire to save a bit of coal and the urge to micromanage society to instill onto the citizenry a sense they’re actually doing something.
Now you might be thinking—as I am—that this whole thing sounds ridiculous!
So why don’t we take a look and see if daylight savings is actually a good thing?
Is Daylight Saving Time Actually Good for Society?
I wish I had a clear answer here. Unfortunately, lots of studies over the years show mixed results. So here’s a few questions that should help cover it.
Does DST help economically?
Losing that precious hour of sleep can hurt worker productivity. While it’s only 1 day a year, we’re creatures of habit, and any small shift in routine can have negative effects like having a higher chance of getting into an accident, having a heart attack, or catching a cold
Increased rates of workplace injury can also occur
One study says the cost of switching to DST is more than $430 million a year in the U.S. alone
The Independent Institute claims that figure is closer to $1.7 billion
Short answer: Probably not, except for some industries that get more sales from the extra hour of sunlight, like retailers and sporting goods.
Does DST hurt our health?
A good analysis in the Journal of Biological Rhythms says there’s a host of potential problems from DST, including short-term effects like shorter sleep and generally worse health outcomes, with longer-term problems caused by time differences between our social clocks and body clocks, including lower life expectancy, sleep problems, and others
Their premise is that establishing DST throughout the year would make chronic effects more severe and negatively affect health more
In America, the timezones were generally set up to have the sun being directly overhead at noon, during DST this is distorted and causes our bodies to be a bit out of whack
A 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics claims over 30 deaths a year are caused by the switch to DST
Short answer: It’s almost certainly worse for our physical and mental health.
Does DST reduce crime?
The Brookings Institute released a study showing a 27% drop in crime during the one hour of extra daylight specifically, with entire crime dropping 7% for each day with DST. I guess criminals just wait an extra hour until it’s dark?
The Department of Transportation also claims crime is lowered during DST
Short answer: There seems to be some credibility that criminals crime less overall with the extra daylight.
Does DST save energy?
The general idea is extra daylight means less activity indoors when it’s dark. But that ignores the ideas of air conditioning, heating, computer use, and everything else indoors.
This brief article covers most of the studies in terms of the U.S., where the results are small and mixed.
This meta-analysis published in 2017 claims an overall drop in energy usage of 0.34%.
Short answer: The results are too mixed to say one way or another, but they almost always come out to less than 1% one way or the other. Geography of the studies is likely a large factor and makes them hard to compare, too.
TLDR
To sum it all up, it does seem to reduce crime a bit, but also causes accidents, heart attacks, mental stress, deaths, and costs the economy a considerable amount of money. Unless you sell golf balls that is.
So, now that we’ve covered what it is, why it exists, who the hell came up with DST, and if it’s any good, you might find yourself wondering
“Is this more of a me problem or what?”
In short—probably!
What Countries Use Daylight Saving Time?
If you’re in America, Hawaii and Arizona already don’t abide by your silly Daylight saving time rules. Alongside American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
As for the rest of the world, from my count, 43 countries still follow Daylight saving time every year. But I bet this map can explain it a lot better than I can.
Dark grey places have never used daylight saving time
Light grey spots previously used it (most of the world)
Orange spots still use it, southern hemisphere
Blue spots still use it, northern hemisphere
For the most part, it seems to be a very western problem, don’t it?
So, Should We Keep Daylight Saving Time?
To wrap this all up, I’m reminded of the 5 monkeys on a ladder fable.
One day, a plunky scientist put five monkeys in a lab room with all the things monkeys could want—except for bananas.
Those were located at the top of a ladder in the middle of the room.
Of course, the monkeys immediately ran up the ladder, whereby a freezing-cold sprinkler would turn on the minute any of them reached the top.
Over and over the monkeys would try, only to freak out and run away after getting spritzed.
Years went by and the monkeys passed down their genes, with the older monkeys teaching the younger monkeys not to go up the ladder lest they all get sprayed.
Eventually, the older monkeys passed on to monkey heaven and all that was left were a bunch of monkeys who wouldn’t touch the ladder.
When asked, none of them could say exactly why.
“That’s just how it’s always been,” goes the adage, which for some reason included the offhand fact that these ladder monkeys learned somewhere along the way to speak PERFECT ENGLISH?!
But I digress, the point is—are we just sticking to Daylight saving time because of century-old tradition and not for any meaningful purpose other than proving how hard it is to pass useful legislation in most western countries in the modern age thus showing we’re actually no better than the ladder monkeys and also have English as our dominant language in most of the countries of the map above?
Yes. Yes, that is the case.
So go ahead and reach for that banana, friend. Call your congressperson and get a bit of extra sleep next year.
(And maybe not die from it.)
Written by a non-DST conforming JJ Pryor.
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For me this was fascinating to understand the thread of “how did we get here” and the true whys along the way rather than just repeating what the old wives tales are, or maybe just knowing part of the story. Also helpful to see the global perspective.
I think many people are looking for better qualities of life and understanding the back stories may make it easier to take a step forward. For example, why in the world did we settle for 5-day workweek instead of negotiating for 4? And why hasn’t it changed (mostly) for more than a century?
Write what you care about and the rest of us will come along for the ride :)
Maybe snarky (on brand) but this is the most comprehensive deep dive into this ridiculous “we’ve always done it this way” ritual I’ve ever ever read. Hopefully some American monkeys who aren’t afraid of water will actually do something about it.