“Benjamin Franklin conceived of it. Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed it. Winston Churchill campaigned for it. Kaiser Wilhelm first employed it. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt went to war with it, and, more recently, the United States fought an energy crisis with it.”
So begins David Prerau’s informative and entertaining book Seize the Daylight, which chronicles what its subtitle calls “the curious and contentious story of Daylight Saving Time.”
Contentious is right. Earlier this week, Americans adjusted the clock again. Well, those of us who still have clocks that needed adjusting. For most people these days, our phones automatically update and “fall back” an hour, reallocating daylight from the evening to the morning. Now we’ll endure the cold, dark days of winter until it’s time to “spring forward” in March and shift an hour’s worth of daylight back to the evening.
This could be the last time we do so. Legislation to stop the clock-turning is closer to passing than at any point in the last 50 years. This year, there’s a proposal that passed the House but has stalled in the Senate to make Daylight Saving Time permanent (that is, the “spring forward” hour). President Trump has been lobbying for this change. As have many other politicians.
How Should We Keep Time?
Seize the Daylight tells the story of this cultural development. For much of human history, the sun determined the time—a history on display in ancient clocks and sundials. (Attending Evensong at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford last year, I was intrigued to discover the service begins every night at 6:05, not 6:00, because the older “Oxford time”—determined by noon being the moment the sun stands highest overhead—runs five minutes behind Greenwich, since the ancient university town lies 1¼ degrees west of London.) It was the railways in the 1800s that prompted countries to standardize their time zones. Then came widespread experiments with turning the clock back or forward an hour.
Can we all acknowledge the enjoyment we get in griping about the clock change twice a year? And also the fun in debating what would be the best solution to put an end to such griping?
Some line up on Team Standard Time: These are your morning people who want the sun to wake you up for your bowl of Wheaties. They get a boost of support from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Others are Team Daylight Saving Time: These are your busy bees who want more daylight in the afternoon for after-school sports and outdoor activities during the winter months. They’re winning the day right now, as it’s their proposal that’s closest to passing. Then there’s Team Do Nothing: They think the arrangement we have now, though not without its irritations, is preferable to locking us all into one time or the other.
Maybe I’m just boring, but I’m on Team Do Nothing. I prefer we stick with the current clock changes. I’m not advocating this view with fiery passion, because I don’t particularly enjoy the sleep disruption of moving the clock forward or back, and I realize there are some benefits to going one way or the other permanently. But I still land here because the current arrangement appropriately manages the trade-offs and because history proves instructive, if we’re open to its lessons.
Let me explain why I’m devoting space to this ongoing debate. There’s something illustrative in the way it holds up a mirror and reveals two blemishes in the American complexion. And these blemishes show up in our politics across the board. The first is an idealistic outlook that makes us think we can bend the world to our desires and minimize any downsides. The second is an ignorance about history that keeps us from learning from the mistakes of previous generations.
Allow me to explain both in turn.
World with No Trade-Offs
A common theme runs through our politics these days—that if we only have the right politicians and the right proposals in place, we’ll be able to bend the world around our needs and desires.
We live in a consumerist society where we experience the “magic” of pressing a button on a phone and then seeing a product we’ve selected arrive, in just hours, on our doorstep. We see the world as controllable, to use Hartmut Rosa’s term, and this view of the world as endlessly malleable leads to an overinflated view of what we can achieve.
What’s funny about the debate over Daylight Saving Time is its framing. Just consider the hilarious name given to the bill that passed this summer: “Sunshine Protection Act.” Does anyone actually think we’re “protecting” sunshine for Americans? No. (At least, I hope not.) But what a way to talk about a proposal you want to appear like common sense! How can you oppose protecting sunshine for people? Really! What kind of terrible person are you to attack the sun?!
President Trump has endorsed this legislation, calling for an end to the “ridiculous, twice yearly production” we endure when we change our clocks. Making Daylight Saving Time permanent, he says, would give us all “a longer, brighter Day.” It’s a bipartisan push. A host of representatives and senators from both parties agree. Who could be against more sunshine?
The problem, of course, is that it isn’t a single ray of sunshine that will be allocated by this legislation, or any other law—as the president and our elected officials know. If we were to make Standard Time permanent, the daylight we enjoy on summer evenings would be shortened by an hour. If we were to make Daylight Saving Time permanent, the light we enjoy on winter mornings would arrive an hour later.
We can debate the merits of either approach, but what often goes missing from these discussions is the wisdom of economist Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, only trade-offs. We can’t fix the problem of less sunshine in the winter. The shorter days are a planetary fact. We’re arguing over something that’s fixed. The whole notion of a “Sunshine Protection Act” promises something no policy can deliver.
We’re in the world of trade-offs. In other words, the real world. The solution is marketed as “more daylight,” but the benefit of an hour of daylight in the evening comes at the cost of an hour of daylight in the morning. As wonderful as the benefit sounds (an extra hour of sunshine on those cold winter afternoons!), there’s a cost.
I live in Middle Tennessee, toward the eastern side of the Central Time Zone. Wouldn’t it be great if in the weeks leading up to and after Christmas, darkness wouldn’t descend over my town by 4:35 p.m.? Of course! Except for the trade-off: It would barely be light by the time my middle-school son’s classes start throughout the winter. To enact Daylight Saving Time permanently would put sunrise a half hour to an hour after children in Louisville, Atlanta, and Indianapolis are already in school.
The benefits of one course of action must be weighed alongside their costs. But the American tendency is to assume we can have the benefits alone. Policies are promised and pushed based on whatever sounds good and marketable. The costs won’t be felt until the proposal is adopted.
Sowell’s book A Conflict of Visions lays out a contrast between constrained and unconstrained views of the world and assumptions about human nature. The unconstrained vision fixates on a problem and develops a solution without ever fully reckoning with the limitations and drawbacks. The constrained vision begins with limits. In this case, there’s a fixed supply of light, and there’s the nature of human biology (with its circadian rhythms and sleep patterns). Any path forward will require us to deal with trade-offs.
Unfortunately, a big problem that plagues our politics across the board is this reticence to reckon with the real costs associated with any or no course of action.
Right now, some politicians are promoting government-run grocery stores as a viable economic model that will bring down prices. Others act as if we can implement tariffs on imports without costs being passed along to the consumer. Two decades ago, risky mortgages led to a housing boom and then a worldwide recession, and just a few years ago, the 2021 stimulus flooded the economy and helped fuel (as predicted) massive inflation. In each of these cases, politicians present their policies as self-evident solutions with clear benefits, while downplaying or denying the real costs.
We don’t live in a world of pure solutions. Human ingenuity can bend aspects of our world to our desires to an unprecedented degree. (Just think of the marvels of central heat and air!) But we’re foolish to think we can extend our powers in a way that removes all the costs and leaves only the benefits.
World with No History
A second blemish mars the American complexion these days—a lack of historical knowledge. In the case of Daylight Saving Time, we’ve been here. We’ve tried this before, and for a good reason!
In the winter of 1973–74, the United States was facing shortages at gas stations. Americans wanted to conserve energy. Time change provided a simple solution, right? Keep the daylight in the evening, and Americans would use less electricity. That reasoning convinced nearly 80 percent of the country to get on board with moving to Daylight Saving Time in the winter months.
The experiment lasted just a few weeks before lawmakers were trying to change it. Parents all across the country hated sending their kids to school before sunrise, and reports of traffic accidents made public safety an issue. “Daylight Disaster Time” was the label a local TV commenter in Florida gave the policy. Public support plummeted. “It’s time to recognize we may well have made a mistake,” said a senator from Iowa. That summer, the same Congress that had enacted the legislation repealed it.
Interesting history, you might say, but things would be different today. It’s true we’re not facing the same kind of energy crisis, and perhaps schools might look for other solutions, such as starting an hour later and staying an hour later during the winter. All well and good, and worthy of debate.
But too often the history of this experiment goes unmentioned in these debates. When a writer for The Dispatch asked lawmakers on Capitol Hill if they were familiar with the previous attempt to “protect sunshine,” he found them blissfully unaware. One paused and asked, “Is that right? It didn’t work? Wow.” A cosponsor of the bill said, “That’s the first I’ve heard of that,” before doubling down on the proposal because “most people feel like . . . going to the new system is better than the old one.”
When Seize the Daylight author Prerau was asked his opinion, he pointed back to the 1974 experiment. “Nobody cared much for the law until it actually happened.” It was only when the costs of morning daylight became inescapable that “people realized how much of an impact it had,” moving it from “a neutral thing that people didn’t think about much to a controversy.”
Interestingly enough, Americans chose something of a middle way with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (with the changes taking effect in 2007). We changed the dates for moving the clock. Before 2007, the clocks were moved the first Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October. But since 2007, the shift has happened the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November, extending Daylight Saving Time for four more weeks a year and giving a little more daylight on the afternoon for Halloween.
Why does this history matter? Because it gives us some evidence to weigh when discussing the trade-offs. And also because it helps us learn from past mistakes. Our society’s lack of interest in history hurts us. It’s frustrating, for example, to see socialist policies making a comeback when we can look at history to see how previous attempts worked out (or didn’t work out at all). When the ideology drives the proposal, the advocate thinks, This time, it’ll be different! Except, most of the time, it’s not.
An ahistorical age keeps us oblivious to what our ancestors already tried. So, in the end, we can’t learn from the past because we’ve not even considered the past as a place to learn from.
Conclusion
“I don’t mind going back to daylight saving time,” the comedian Victor Borge once quipped. “With inflation, the hour will be the only thing I’ve saved all year!”
We Americans are a forward-looking people, brimming with enthusiasm and idealism in all the best ways. But we would be a healthier society if we tempered our enthusiasm for wide-ranging “solutions” and lowered our expectations, recognizing we’re always weighing a series of trade-offs.
We would also be healthier if we cared more about history, so we avoid the stumbles and pitfalls of previous generations and keep from barreling down dead-end roads. The debate over Daylight Saving Time is a bipartisan example of what happens when we forget the world of limits and neglect the world of the past.
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