The entire backstory of Daylight Saving Time reads a bit like a soap opera. No, seriously… it’s fantastically filled with drama, deceit and special interests. Check it out!
The Popular Mythology
When I was growing up, I was told Daylight Saving Time existed so kids wouldn’t have to wait for the school bus in the dark. Apparently if you grow up in a more rural area, you were told a version of this story that says Daylight Saving helped farmers in a similar way.
This is one of those bold mistruths that depends entirely on the hearer giving it exactly zero thought. None. But DO think about it for one moment: In the portion of the year with the least daylight, we stick to the “Standard” time schedule. The conscious decision to change the clocks affects the portion of the year where there’s plenty of daylight (and the kids are out of school for a lot of it). Also, it turns out farmers lobby against the continuation of Daylight Saving Time because (spoiler alert!) crops and livestock don’t have clocks and do their thing based on actual sunrise and sunset.
The Official Story
Daylight Saving Time made its US debut in 1918, during WWI. The goal was to reduce energy consumption during wartime. You see, people slept through useful daylight every morning and then turned on their lights at night, burning power the country could use to fight the war. Why not shift the clocks an hour to more efficiently use the natural resource of sunlight? It turns out this rationale actually holds (or more likely, held… more on this in a moment) a bit of water.
The whole concept proved unpopular and went away after the war, only to be reinstated during WWII and then formalized in 1966 by Lyndon Johnson and expanded in 1974 by Richard Nixon in response to the energy crisis.
The Pretty Impressive Cost of Daylight Saving
A lot of people dislike changing their clocks twice a year. It turns out they’re onto something. Switching the clocks an hour induces jetlag without the jet, which is a meaningful stressor to the human body. Studies show a spike in workplace injuries, car wrecks and even heart attacks in the days following the time change in both Spring and Fall.
The Pretty Impressive Value of Daylight Saving Time
Sorry kids, farmers and energy savers, but in this case, it seems it’s golfers calling the shots. Yup. Golf. It turns out people can get in a lot more golf with that extra hour of light in the evening. About $200 million worth each year according to what the US golf industry told Congress. But it’s not just golf, the barbecue industry says the time change is worth $100 million to them each year. Grocery stores and restaurants benefit, people do more home improvement work and generally do stuff with the extra hour of light at night. Daylight-Saving Time does give a serious summer boost to many industries.
The great Irony? All this added economic activity increases energy consumption as we drive ourselves around to all those activities. In 2019, the official rationale for Daylight-Saving is – at best – a wash. So, there you have it, the twisting tale of a policy started for one reason, popularly explained with a second (wrong) reason, and maintained for a third, largely unknown, reason. And that, kids, is how policies get made!
This is fascinating! I had no idea, and have heard both the school bus and farmer excuse many many times. Damn golfers screwing it up for the rest of us…