What are we saving time for?

Daylight Saving Time ended this morning at 2am. When that happens, it creates a distortion in the time-space continuum. How do I know? Well, I slept until 9am but got up at 8am. How else do you explain that? I got an extra hour of sleep without actually sleeping in. That invokes the age-old question: If a clock changes in the forest and no one sees it, does time really pass?

Did I really sleep an hour longer? Yes, I did, and I can prove it. Some of the clocks in my house don’t change automatically…so this morning, before I dutifully changed all the  clocks, there was proof that it used to be 9am and only changed because the government decided we should set the clocks back to what they were before we set them forward in the spring.

That begs a simple question. Why are we doing this? You know, not all countries around the world do this. Hell, not all states in our country do this—Hawaii and most of Arizona opt out. As an interesting aside, the Navajo Nation—located in part within Arizona— does observe Daylight Savings Time.  (What do you get when you combine Indian Time and Daylight Saving Time? It’s still Indian Time.) Actually most of Asia, Africa, and South America don’t save time and neither does the northern two-thirds of Australia. Really most of the world does not play this silly game.

Whose idea was this anyway? Well, Benjamin Franklin is often credited with coming up with the idea way back in 1784…really a time before people were worried about standardized time keeping. Franklin was living in France and wrote a satirical letter (imagine that) imploring Parisians to get up earlier in the summer to take advantage of the early light. He argued they would save money on candles. Remember this is our “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” guy. He proposed taxing shutters, ringing church bells, and firing cannons to get people up earlier. I love Franklin, but this seems like a stretch to say that he was calling for Daylight Saving Time. Must Americans take credit for everything…especially things of questionable benefit?

Really, no one worried about standardizing time over large areas until those large areas were connected by transport…and the great liberator of men, commerce. That happened in lots of places after the middle of the 19^th century. So it isn’t surprising that people didn’t start talking about saving daylight until near the turn of the 20^th century. The guy who first cooked this all up was an amateur entomologist in New Zealand—George Vernon Hudson. His day job forced him to do his bug hunting on the side and the amount of time he had to do that during the week varied with the seasons. So he wrote some papers (1895-1898) and did some lobbying…to no avail. Independently a well-to-do Englishman William Willett came up with the same idea in 1905. It seems he was an avid outdoorsman and golfer who was peeved that he had to cut his afternoon golf rounds short in the summer—probably made it impossible to have proper tea.

Surprisingly, none of this caught on until World War I when Germany adopted Summer Time in 1916 as a way of rationing coal that was in short supply because of the war effort. The US jumped on the bandwagon in 1918, after we joined the war. It didn’t really stick in the US, except during war time, until 1966. Since then it has been extended twice (1987 and 2007). Guess who lobbied hard for those extensions? Clorox (parent company of Kingsford charcoal) and 7-Eleven were heavily involved in 1987 and the Sporting Good Manufacturing Association and the National Association of Convenience Stores took the lead in 2007. Does that give you some idea of why we really do this?

The impetus in World War I and II was to conserve energy resources for the war effort. Following Franklin’s original prompting many argued that Daylight Saving Time would save money in energy costs. It turns out that it really hasn’t. In fact, you can find studies suggesting it actually costs a lot of money from things like decreased worker productivity, scheduling inefficiencies, public health problems, and the like. What seems to be clear is that certain industries—leisure, sports, and convenience stores—make boatloads of money because of Daylight Saving Time. It’s equally clear that other parts of the economy derive no benefit at all. The agricultural lobby has opposed it since day one.

So why do we spring forward and fall back? Is it to save energy costs, improve public health, reduce violent crime? If the data are to be believed, the answer is no. Is it so we are less depressed during the shortened days of winter? That may be the saving grace of the whole idea on an individual level, but it doesn’t seem to be why politicians to support it. We do it because powerful lobbies—ones with money to be made—have convinced politicians that they could make us believe we need to do it to save money. Funny thing, but it seems to be designed to do just the opposite. It’s really designed to get me to spend more money on golf balls, light beer, and EZ lite charcoal.

All hail the mighty dollar for it shall make us rich, equal, and free.