Time Is Not Money, Stop Thinking of It Like That (On the "Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible" Proposal)

You may have read the recent article by Allison Schrager on why Daylight Saving Time is bad. It's a great example of why economists shouldn't dictate policy.

Insanity, you say. Economists use sophisticated predictive models and keep that multi-trillion-dollar global economy of ours spinning smoothly of course. They are hardly the sort of people who just guess at the future and use hindsight in explaining the past.

For the record, I support removing Daylight Saving Time, but not like this. Schrager's article in The Atlantic contains as much thoroughly-researched evidence to support its thesis as you'd come to expect from a term paper written for a high school Problems of Democracy course. Schrager confuses Daylight Saving Time — a national protocol whose nebulous intent is to save energy in the summer — with eliminating time zones, which is a set of regional agreements she rightly attributes to unifying transportation systems from the 19th century. It goes without saying that these are two entirely different systems and Schrager breaks them both.

Her proposal as it's written is to standardize Eastern and Central time zones to EST, and to snap Pacific time to MST. OK, you're stealing an extra hour away from everyone in California, Oregon, and Washington. No biggie there, as we Left Coasters are all free-loving hippies and would just have wasted that hour playing hacky sack or protesting the corporations, man. Schrager says Daylight Saving Time is bad, but her real hatred is of the time disparities caused by flying across North America. She completely blows off Hawaii and Alaska. Either these states are too insignificant for her to adjust the focus of her economist lens or they are too far away from the continent to really, truly deserve to have their time zone fucked with. This begs the question: why does Schrager advocate two time zones and not simply one? I asked a couple pilots and they told me that the aviation industry already standardized on UTC, which is the smartest thing any of us could do shy of aligning the whole shebang to proleptic TAI back to the Big Bang. Schrager feels there must be some kind of time zone alignment, but she doesn't clearly elaborate on why. I have two ideas on this.

First, Schrager wants to garner support to kill time zones — annoying, but persistent and benign — by pretending that her system was designed to end Daylight Saving Time — annoying, periodic, and malicious. In order to gain support, she must avoid provoking the farmers as much as her plan can allow. Farmers for some durn reason insist that we stop messing with the clock on the wall because it interferes with their daily business, one of the few businesses remaining in a digital world that is exclusively controlled by that big yellow star that slides across the sky. The chickens, as it turns out, didn't get the DST memo. There are some businesses that still depend on when the sun shines, and screwing with the clock on the wall is a massive annoyance to those industries.

Secondly, by killing all time zones, we no longer have that fundamental measuring stick of the time of day that we've used since the stone age: having the sun be directly overhead at noon, wherever you happen to be. (Caveat: Plus or minus 15 degrees of equatorial distance. Caveat: Does not account for longitude.) The need to have the sun rise during the morning and set during the evening is an ancient one and eliminating it would save a lot of people a lot of headaches. We could abolish time zones, kill DST, and squash the leap second in one fell swoop. The only downside is that you're going to continue waking up and going to bed when the sun shines and it will have no other impact on what your watch says. You will, for example, work from 6 PM to 2 AM, every day, because that's when the sun is up. You can set and reset your clocks from now until Doomsday but you can't so easily override your circadian rhythms and you wouldn't want to if you could.

Most people would have a problem adapting to this and if you're not sure why, try moving up north to one of those 30-days-of-night places for a year or so. I suspect our fixation on having time zones at all stems from the belief that we have always culturally considered 8 AM to be "morning" and 8 PM to be "evening" everywhere and our society has built itself accordingly. The backlash of, for example, erasing five to eight hours from the lives of a few hundred million Americans is not viable politically-speaking. Schrager clearly still wants the sun to be somewhere overhead at some point during the average American's day. She just doesn't really care if it's closer to 1 or 2 o'clock, truth be told.

As though an argument to make transcontinental flying easy couched as a plea to eliminate an unrelated timekeeping policy weren't bad enough, this economist does exactly what you'd expect an academe to do: focus on the part of the problem that interests her, handwave the rest away. She writes:

"With a one-hour time difference, bi-costal [sic] travel would become almost effortless. It might make international business harder, but it's hard to say for certain. The east coast would be seven hours behind continental Europe, but one hour closer to time zones in Asia. Also, the gains from more frequent inter-state communication might outweigh the cost of extra international coordination."

In other words, "once I change the country so my jet lag isn't so bad, maybe this will colossally screw up America's ever-growingly-vital international trade industry i dunno whatevs". El oh el, Schrager, way to think of all the angles on this one. She concludes the proposal this way as well, her last lingering thought on the matter is "Time is arbitrary so why not change it so it's more convenient?" She writes that we should just change how to keep time so it works "in our favor". What she really means is "in my favor, good luck Alaska, Hawaii, and everyone else in North America who doesn't live between New York and Austin".

Her idea that time zone boundaries interfere with inter-state communication is also laughable. It bore merit back in the day when the Western Union office would shut down its telegraph office at the end of the business day, but in the 21st century e-mail is always up. I have second-hand experience with stories of West Coast companies losing East Coast customers because they repeatedly kept trying to drop everything and fix the customer's problem... at 5 PM Pacific time. Sure enough, day after day, the customer was not still in his office at 8 PM Eastern. Schrager's 1-hour East Coast/West Coast offset (or "East Cost/West Cost offset" if you're an economist and not a proofreader) wouldn't fix this because a customer who isn't in his office after 5 PM Eastern still wouldn't be the office at 6 PM Eastern. In Schrager's utopian 2-time zone America, that West Coast company would still have had to get its 9-to-5 head out of its bi-coastal ass.

Even though Schrager's misshapen, ill-borne plan to kill time zones could potentially have benefits (as she outlines, China miraculously operates on one time zone because if you don't like it, tanks!) she loses more credibility by needlessly insulting the Spanish for no discernible reason. Maybe she had some bad paella somewhere and never got over it. It's a sour note in her proposal, one that doesn't belong and yet somehow survived every one of (clearly) very few revisions she made to her submission.