OPINION:
Americans are tired of losing sleep.
On the second Sunday in March, Americans push their clocks forward an hour and bear a shorted night to initiate daylight saving time.
Church attendance is unusually sparse. Some folks miss the exercise altogether or show up late, just in time for the coffee. I like the latter solution — often it rescues the faithful from a sermon on social justice premised more on the heretics of critical race theory than prophets of the Bible.
Most folks take a week or two to adjust and it shows. A 2020 study of traffic incidents showed a 6% spike in fatal car crashes the first week of DST.
As a nation that likes to burn the candle at both ends, we aren’t bothered as much by getting an extra hour of sleep in November. However, polls show about two-thirds of Americans would like the biannual tinkering with time to stop and most of those would prefer year-round DST.
Folks can rush home or hobble from home offices to garden and attend kids’ soccer games. For those of us who still shop outside, it gives a boost to retailing.
Golfers could squeeze in eight or even 16 holes in the warmer latitudes. Though some diehards in the north will dress like snowmen and short of hail or an ice storm, risk getting beaned by the errant swing.
Through mid-19th century, Americans set their watches against local sundials. New York was minutes ahead of Washington and behind Boston.
The advent of railroads made that convention impossible. Those first published schedules according to the time at their company’s headquarters and left it to communities along their lines to transpose into local time. Eventually, they adopted a more-or-less unified system of time zones of peculiar formation — the western border of the Eastern Time Zone ran through the major stations in Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Charleston and Atlanta.
The procedure was adopted ad hoc across the country until the federal 1918 Standard Time Act, which established time zones as we know them now and implemented DST as a temporary wartime measure.
Subsequently, New York City and many other metro areas continued seasonal DST. It was national policy again for World War II and continued by many states afterward. It became a permanent national policy in 1966 with the Uniform Time Act.
The end and start dates have been tinkered with since, endlessly studied by psychologists and physicians, and cursed the morning after DST commences by a sleep-deprived public who generally want it made permanent.
Alas, most fun things that tamper with nature are either immoral, illegal or fattening.
Scientists say year-round DST would be bad for us. It doesn’t save much electricity, and if we are to have just one clock, it should be year-round standard time.
Our biological functions are attuned to movements of the sun. Morning light triggers alertness, modulates our stress responses and regulates our emotions. Evening darkness releases melatonin that helps us sleep.
Year-round DST — especially in northern states where the amount of daylight varies more with the seasons — could increase emotional disorders, obesity, heart attacks, diabetes and all manner of ailments associated with modern living. These problems would be especially acute on the Western edges of time zones where sunrises are later.
A recently passed Senate bill would implement year-round DST but addresses the above-mentioned issues by permitting states to opt-out — go on standard time year-round. Time zones borders already split states and all that is missing is to let states redraw those borders in adopting standard or daylight time — a free market in time, based on community preferences.
New York, for example, stretching from Staten Island to Plattsburgh, could split off the Adirondacks for standard time, and states like Tennessee, already divided between Central and Eastern Time, could move their time zone border eastward to accommodate.
Many fewer children walk or bike to school, and the accidents that caused such a furor when year-round daylight savings time was implemented briefly during the 1970s energy crisis would be less of an issue. Americans already ignore the metabolic cues by rising in the dark to steal hours of evening sunlight.
Often, schools ignore the sun anyway. For about 25 years, when my wife taught in Fairfax County, her first classes began at 7:20 a.m. The kids with long bus rides were up before dawn no matter the clock.
Many Americans already set their own time — work-at-home enables nocturnal personalities to thrive. This column is routinely written between 2 and 6 a.m. — phones don’t ring, my mind is undistracted, and emotions are not rattled by markets and politicians.
• Peter Morici is an economist, emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and national columnist.
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