President-elect Trump recently let drop that he would like to see daylight savings time eliminated. It’s not his worst proposal. Serious arguments have been made for leaving the clocks on standard time year around. But before we ditch this century-old practice, let me offer a modified defense of DST.
The best argument for daylight savings time, dating back to our nation’s founding, is that it better aligns the clock with our normal daily activities. DST makes it easier for Americans to spend more of their waking hours in the daylight rather than the dark of night. Instead of sleeping through the first hour of sunlight in the morning, we can spend more time in in the daylight after work. As Ben Franklin (an early proponent of the idea) pithily observed, it’s silly during summer “to live much by candlelight and sleep by sunshine.”
If we stuck to standard time through the full year, the sun would rise at an absurdly early hour for tens of millions of Americans. Without DST, sunrise on June 22, 2025, in Boston would be 4:08 a.m., Chicago 4:16 a.m., Denver 4:32 a.m., Seattle 4:12 a.m. Who in their right mind wants to hear birds chirping outside their window at such an early hour? That’s a good three to four hours before most people need to report to work or otherwise start their daily activities.
With DST, after a day or two of adjustment, most people can enjoy an extra hour of sleep in the dark without sunlight streaming in their windows. And in the evening, after dinner, they can spend an extra hour of daylight sitting on the back porch, riding their bike, or playing catch in the backyard with the kids.
Opponents of DST argue that forcing people to change their clocks in the spring and fall can endanger health by raising stress. I’ll admit that getting up an hour earlier in the spring can be a challenge for the first few days. But nobody objects to having four different time zones across the United States, even though it can cause the same jet-lag-type stress with travelers. Time zones achieve the same end as DST by more closely matching the local clock with the rhythm of daily life.
Perhaps my anti-DST friends secretly long to emulate Communist China! Shortly after Chairman Mao and the Red Army seized power in 1949, the People’s Republic folded the country’s five time zones into a single zone. (See the results below.) Today you can drive or fly 3,300 miles across Mainland China and never need to adjust your watch. I suppose there are advantages to a single, nationwide time zone even in a continental-sized country, but I can imagine the obvious downsides, too.
Moving to year-around DST isn’t the answer. That would just create a different mismatch between daylight hours and daily activities, forcing people in winter to start their work and school day long before the sun comes up. In central Minnesota, where I grew up, DST in late December would mean the sun wouldn’t rise until 9 a.m.! (A Wall Street Journal editorial this morning rebuts the common arguments made for permanently shifting the clocks forward.) With DST we can flexibly adjust both the summer clock and the winter clock to better match our daily schedules.
Note that I haven’t argued for DST as a way to save energy. The empirical evidence for that is weak. Congress in its zeal to save the planet has expanded DST in recent decades, most recently in 2005, to run from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. That’s almost eight months of DST, more than enough, even for me! As a compromise, perhaps the incoming president can work with Congress to restore DST to its more traditional six months, running from, say, mid-April to mid-October.
Daylight savings time is essentially a way to collectively trick ourselves into getting up an hour earlier in the summer months. But the benign result is that our normal activities better align with daylight hours. Ben Franklin was right. By adjusting our clocks twice a year, we can sleep more in the dark, and work and play more in the light.
Daniel Griswold's Blog 