Daylight Saving Time

Twice a year my Twitter feed is full of people complaining about Daylight Saving Time. Actually, most of them don't object to DST, they object to Standard Time. They would prefer (they believe) for DST to be adopted on a year-round basis so that clocks never need to be changed.

I think this is wrong because it implies a sunrise after 8 a.m. in much of the country, meaning that school children would be walking to school, or waiting for the bus, in the dark. Year-round DST proponents respond in one of two ways:

1. Some of them bite the bullet and say that whatever deaths are caused by DST are worth it because sunset is later, and they are more likely to be awake at sunset than at sunrise.

2. Some of them propose shifting school hours so that children are still able to walk to school when it's light out.

The first answer is superficially less reasonable, but in a way I think it's much more reasonable than the second. Take a minute to think about how the second argument works. The idea is that institutions will simply shift their hours during the winter to take account of reduced sunlight in the morning hours. Schools, for instance, will start an hour later. In turn, employers will start an hour later to allow parents to drop children off at school. Stores, taking account of people's daily routines and the needs of their own employees, will shift their hours later by an hour.

Pretty soon you are back where you started, except that the costs of the annual shift are greatly increased. Imagine that your school switches to winter hours a week later than your employer. What are you going to do during that week? And think about shopping, or going to museums, or whatever. Having to remember when each institution switches to winter hours is needlessly burdensome.

I think that kind of world is attractive only to extreme libertarians. Most people don't want the freedom to decide when winter hours will go into effect. They wouldn't enjoy the costs of coordinating that kind of thing without government intervention.

Maybe the government should simply specify when winter hours go into effect, rather than making it legally mandatory. But of course business hours are generally not legally mandatory anyway, so a business could always offset the switch to Standard Time by shifting its hours in the opposite direction. Now you're just quibbling about who should have to change their clocks vs. their hours.

Anyway long story short, either you think the coordination would happen even without government intervention, or you don't. If you don't think it would happen, then you have to address the costs of morning darkness, but you can perhaps make your case. If you think coordination would happen anyway, then it seems very silly to oppose by far the lowest cost way to implement it.