Daylight Saving Redux

In which I appear in the most mainstream of media

Full moon over Niskayuna, now that my morning dog walk is before sunrise again.

As you may or may not remember, I wrote a half-joking thing about an alternative approach to Daylight Saving Time here last week:

A Modest Proposal for the Saving of Daylight

That came about because I was talking to a friend in the Communications office at Union, and suggested the upcoming time change as a hook for pitching a story to major media outlets. That wasn’t successful (it didn’t help that we were already very close to the change, and thus didn’t allow much lead time), so I wrote a post about it, and then figured it was dead.

Then I got a new lease on mass-media life, thanks to the peculiarities of the US Senate. A bill to switch to year-round Daylight Saving time (that is, to “spring forward” in 2023 but never “fall back”) was introduced and passed by unanimous consent, mostly because key Senators weren’t paying attention. It’s a great way to run a government.

Anyway, that kicked off a whole new round of buzz, including this entertaining rant from Josh Barro, which led us to try the pitch again, and this time we got some interest from the Washington Post. After a couple of rounds of edits, that led to this piece adapted from the relevant book section appearing in the “Made By History” section today. Woo-hoo!

(I would’ve liked them to throw in a direct link to the Amazon page for my book, but, you know, beggars, choosers…)

With regard to the time change, as you can probably guess from the post and the op-ed, I am generally fine with the idea. I like long summer evenings, but more importantly, I like the relatively late sunrises we get in the winters thanks to the shift back to Standard Time; if we were going to eliminate the shift, I would definitely prefer year-round Standard Time. Year-round DST is the worst of the three options (switching twice a year, year-round Standard, year-round DST), by a good margin.

In its inimitable fashion, of course, Twitter has taken the debate about clock-switching, which is already pretty silly, and turned it into a #discourse that is much, much dumber. We’ve got people boldly declaring their preference for evening light who already act like it’s a human rights violation to ask them to be functional at 8am under the current system where it’s already light out. I find it implausible in the extreme to think they would just take an 8:45 sunrise in stride. And then there are the geniuses who suggest that we just leave the clocks alone, and shift the work and school day later during the winter to compensate, which, congratulations, you just re-invented Daylight Saving Time, only stupider. And there’s the faintly New Age-y crowd who want circadian rhythms given top priority, apparently without realizing that this implicitly means they’re against time zones larger than a single metro area.

At the end of the day (heh), clock time is and always has been a matter of social convention, which means trading off various interests to find a system that allows society to function smoothly and relatively pleasantly. Daylight Saving Time is the most explicit manifestation of this, but the mere fact that Philadelphia and Pittsburgh set their clocks to the same time— let alone Portland, ME and Indianapolis, IN— means that we’ve done some tweaking to time for general convenience. That’s not going to make everybody happy, but no system will, and what we’ve got now does about as good a job of striking that balance as anything else.

Anyway, while I find a lot of the #discourse around this depressing because of the dumb hyper-polarization the medium demands, I am happy that it presented this opportunity. So, you know, check me out in the WaPo, and then buy my book…

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This was the thing alluded to in a couple of other posts that was taking up mental energy that I otherwise might’ve used to write something substantive here. I still do have a couple other things to come back to, so here are some buttons:

And if you want to yell at me about Daylight Saving time, the comments will be open.