The assumption underlying your article is that maximizing time awake during daylight is always good.
That is the wrong approach. There is ample science showing that very late sunsets disrupt our sleep patterns, leading to a cacophony of other health problems. This is what we get with the current DST, and we get that sleep disruption for months every summer.
Also, waking up to a long period of darkness is very detrimental to mental and physical health. This is all well documented by a host of scientific studies. This would be a byproduct of permanent DST, we'd get this in the winter.
We should not be optimizing for "more waking daylight". We should be optimizing for a healthy and productive country. That means daylight at the right time, and darkness at the right time.
Permanent STANDARD time is the way to get closer to this.
This is the unusual situation in which "think of the children" is a fair response, I think. Here in Michigan, on the western edge of the eastern time zone, kids already spend the month of October (before the shift to standard time) walking to school in the dark; and there's only about a week of light before the shortening days make it pitch black again. With permanent DST, we'd have weeks of sunrises around 9 am, and dark mornings for most of the school year. And it's no fun trying to get young kids to bed in the summer when it's still not just light, but bright, and will be for hours. This shouldn't be optimized for baseball fans and pub crawls...
DST was extended past Halloween to allow children to complete their trick-or-treating in daylight over much of the country. It had nothing to do with any "sugar lobby ".
Sunrise in Grand Rapids on October 17 is still before 8am. If kids spend the month of October walking to school in the dark, that is a sign that school starts way too early, not that daylight savings time is the issue.
And to be clear Nate is not advocating permanent DST - he’s saying the current system is good, but that if people are totally averse to changing clocks that permanent DST is better than permanent standard time.
There’s no health benefit to darkness at 10 pm. There is health benefit to darkness a few hours before you sleep. It doesn’t matter what number we call the time that sun sets or that we sleep, it just matters that they line up ok.
I often think it would be best for everyone everywhere in the world to just use Greenwich mean time year round and then let local communities decide what hour school and work and other things like that start.
Yes, and kids basically all have delayed sleep phase in today's world so it really puts a squeeze on sleep to move the clock relative to sunset. I think most people don't understand that (or don't care).
Sure, you could create your own timezone by sleeping whenever you want, obviously. But schools and workplaces generally have fixed schedules, so we're locked in by that. If the sun sets too late, there is no option to stay up later, and wake up later, to make up for it.
Schools and workplaces generally have fixed schedules. But they choose those schedules locally, with the input of local people who have seen the sun rise and set. There is no law that business needs to start at 7 am or whatever, or that school needs to stop at 4 pm. By having a single global time zone (or China’s single national time zone) you make it explicit that local businesses and schools set it in a way that makes sense for them. If the Sun sets late, they will choose later schedules. If the Sun sets early, they will choose earlier schedules.
I mean, I've pointed out to friends that while e.g. Florida can't go to permanent DST, they could have the effect of doing so by just saying "...and when Standard Time is in effect, everything the state does shifts by an hour to compensate."
China is not a good reference point. Yes, one time zone despite a huge longitudinal spread, but schools generally start at the same across the country. So the type of societal adaptation you're talking about, well it just doesn't happen. Instead, you have REALLY misaligned schedules in different parts of the country. Terrible system.
The clock is based off the sundial. Noon is the middle of the day when the sun is highest. Midnight is 12 hours away from that. It's a simple measurement that everyone can relate to. Time zones keep us roughly aligned to that.
I've lived a number of years in China, including way out west, and that hasn't been my personal experience.
There's a time-wise gravitational pull towards the East that's a bit more pronounced than what you would think of for Californians who work for firms whose business basically needs to respect East Coast open and closing hours, but I think that also reflects that China's population is much more concentrated in the East than the US's.
Obviously, my personal experience might've been very oblivious. But I'm fluent in Chinese. But in order to accept this, I would need to see some serious articles that weren't just China-bashing journalists.
Yeah, Nate is just completely wrong on this. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine strongly opposes DST, because there's broad agreement that forcing lots of people to wake up when it's still dark is quite bad for public health.
It's not just about light. They really are simply forced to wake earlier relative to sun and social signals. I don't get why that's by far the least talked about issue. It's about forcing earlier sleep taking by definition yet somehow people exclusively talk about light levels. I don't get it.
Cheeseburgers are not good for our health either. We gonna ban those next? If the minority of people like more sun in the evening, is there some reason we should impose something they don’t want on them? Cannot people choose the less healthy option if they want? Isn’t that part of the American ethos?
In greater Atlanta, DST goes too late into the year. The week before we fall back, the sun doesn’t rise until almost 8. I would prefer falling back 15 minutes every two weeks beginning the first weekend after the equinox, and doing that 4 times.
I'm confused, doesn't putting the sunrise earlier (as standard time would do) nudge us all to be virtuous early risers? I'm all for a later deadline to wake, but universal standard time seems like an earlier one.
Nope. First think of sunset, if you delay that on the clock, you're delaying melatonin which conflicts with social wake time being an hour earlier. Now when people are up earlier it's still dark so that also delays the suppression of melatonin to signal the day started. Humans are meant to sleep through the transition to sunrise, it's artificially shifting the clock that reduces our ability to get enough sleep. Keep in mind kids already have a delayed sleep phase from modern life so DST puts an even worse squeeze on their sleep. It's the time relative to the sun that matters. That's why DST really is a preference of early risers that can easily adjust. The emphasis on morning lighting is a bit of bad messaging from standard time advocates in my opinion.
@Morris — yep, exactly right. If maximizing total hours of very bright light during the day is the goal, then we should be going around giving people 10,000 lux lamps to keep on 24 hours a day. Except obviously not, because that's torture.
So the right answer is that people need light at some times and darkness at other times. If you have total control over your work hours, you can do whatever you want to get this light/dark balance. But for people who have to get up early for work or school, permanent DST makes it so the distribution of light over the course of the day has too little light in the morning and too much light in the latter half of the day, delaying melatonin rhythms, messing up sleep, etc.
You must not live in a northern city. Standard time in summer in Seattle would result in crazy early sunrise, also screwing with people’s natural rhythms. If it gets light in my bedroom at 4 am when I’m trying g to sleep, that’s gotta have negative health consequences as well.
That's basically an opinion piece masquerading as a scientific research paper. The scientific data around this is actually fairly thin - there has been exactly one study, conducted in 2014 in Northern Russia (a place of extreme time variations to begin with) around the differences between permanent DST and permanent ST. The rest is theory.
This also assumes that physical health is the only factor. There is evidence that psychological health is improved with more daylight, and that more daylight is better for the economy, and that people's sense of life satisfaction is improved with more daylight hours in the evenings, when they have time. It's not as cut and dry as you make it out to be.
Finally, as mentioned above, only one small study has been done on the effects of permanent DST vs permanent ST. The rest is based on research around social jetlag in general, and I don't think whether we go permanent ST or permanent DST will solve that. I have to wake up before the sun rises for work no matter the season - and I go to bed when it's dark no matter the season. Changing the clocks will not magically get rid of social jetlag - only cultural changes that align work and school with the sun will do that.
Hey, its a winner for Nate's actual worst take. The politics stuff is fine.
I do think you criminally downplay the cost of the switching. Its not just a "few car accidents". There is evidence for health impacts, energy cost, sleep risks, and health risks (yes, I am putting it in twice). JHU is oddly in favor of removing the swap, but permanent standard time (see link below).
I also think you make a point you skip over that people adopt habits to their sunlight options. So overall people would likely create patterns based on sunlight available and then we can still get rid of the plan to deal with switching.
You missed the part about the effect of extra darkness during people’s awake hours in the evening. 15-45 minutes of extra darkness for the entire year (and people are more likely to drive drunk in the evening than the morning) more than offsets the 30 deaths during the actual time change
That's assuming its 30 deaths. He hand waves all the other impacts and lumps it into "30 traffic fatalities". Its part of why I added JHU's work, since I assume a large public health group would have a better take.
I'm not perfectly sure that dismissing some deaths as not something that matters is sufficiently "woke" for a Democrat and Harris voter --------- maybe needs thot. Well, if it's just white male Trump voters, I suppose it would be a GOOD thing to have deaths, twice as many would be better, no doubt, but probably people suffer from moving the clocks wildly around without reference to political party.
Huh. Maybe now it's rightwing because maybe Trump likes it -------- that would make DST twice yearly time change popular with Dems.
You realize this has nothing at all to do with science, or anything at all except who has and who gets the Power to control the people.
I'm definitely on the permanent DST train (as opposed to permanent standard time), but either one would be better than the constant swapping back and forth. I switched to personal permanent DST back in 2021 and it has been the best thing ever.
I suspect kids would be hard, but I'm in a similar boat and you don't need all the way to self-employed to be able to do this, although your life does need some flexibility.
I have friends in China I call at a regular hour THEIR evening (so my morning in the US), several times a week and we have dinner/breakfast "together."
For me that's enough to keep me getting up and going to bed at the same solar time. For part of the year I have an extra hour before heading out the door, and another part of the year I have an extra hour when I come home before going to bed, and that's an hour I just fill in with fun stuff, and this hour of entertainment is the thing I swap around rather than sleep.
You do realize that a) the vast majority of Americans despise the time change, and b) we really did live without it for a very long time. And the American people survived.
Let's be honest -- you live in NYC and you like the current system. That's your preference. All the rest of what you wrote is a huge pointless diatribe. The answer to the problem is one single nationwide time zone system that does not change twice a year, and allow states to choose which zone they want to be in (within geographic reason).
Latitudinal differences in hours of sunlight and sunrise/sunset are a fact of planetary science, and we can try to fight it with policy, but at the end of the day (pun intended), the upshot of your research is that whatever happens, some people will complain. So let's let the democratic process handle this one.
“a) the vast majority of Americans despise the time change, and b) we really did live without it for a very long time. And the American people survived.”
I take it *you* realize that in the 70s we stopped switching, but people hated the change so we went back? “We’d survive” is not the right question; the right question is would we be happy with what we got?
The world is different now. The big complaint in the 70s was that kids were off to school in the dark. Well, my kids are off to school in the dark today because school starts so damn early. That argument isn't the same now as it was in the 70s as that's true for many people.
I have seen the late sunrise argument brought up in every single reddit post, article, etc. about this issue whenever it is brought up so I think the argument is very much still relevant now.
Seems to me that the time change might be like elections. The people who really hated changing, all rallied, wrote letters, donated cash. They succeeded in getting the switch eliminated. Then, the people who want the change and earlier daylight in winter were all aggrieved. They rallied, wrote letters, and donated money. They then won and got it changed back. In elections the people who do t have power want it and work harder to get back in. The people in power get complacent. Seems exactly like the time change elimination experiment. Currently, the people who hate changing are the aggrieved ones and are fighting harder.
3 things: first, the switch was to permanent DST, not permanent standard; second, it was forced nationwide, and third, it was always intended as temporary, we didn't "go back because people hated it."
People will complain about *any* policy change, then they adapt, as individuals and as state/local governments (look at Obamacare for an example). Social security was deeply unpopular when it was first implemented.
Schools and employers will adjust schedules, organizations and sports clubs adjust meeting/game times, etc. On balance, the data indicate that the time change does more harm than good. One single national time that allows states some leeway to choose their zone would likely be the best option. And I'm personally in favor of permanent standard time.
Getting rid of DST and maintaining standard time as the, well, standard, is one of the few good ideas this bunch of low wattage "thinkers" have had. If you're worried about missing daylight, get up earlier and leave the rest of us that would prefer not being forced to deal with increased risk of heart attacks and strokes, sleep disruption, mood disturbances, higher rates of car accidents, cognitive impairment, digestive issues, and overall disruption to the body's natural circadian rhythm twice every year alone. Compared to that, loosing a mere 40 minutes of daylight seems like the bargain of the millennia. DST made some degree of sense when the world was mostly rural and agrarian, but now that that time has past, DST is an idea that has outlived its usefulness in the industrialized nations.
Daylight before work is much less valuable than daylight after work. Getting up early doesn’t solve the “I want it to be light out when I go for a walk after dinner” problem.
Listen to how superficial and selfish that complaint is when it's to justify a blanket mandate of earlier waking on everyone else. Basically turning 7am into 6am for school kids.
It actually made no sense when the world was rural and agrarian either. DST was designed to save lighting costs (first kerosene and then electricity). Ask any dairy farmer whether the cows obey the clock or the sun and you'll understand why the idea that DST was supposed to help ag interests is ridiculous.
It was designed to control people so they would submit to conscription and fighting overseas in a war that was none of our business and everyone knew it in 1917.
Hey, if the government even controls our TIME, it controls everything.
And all the drama with computers and logging goes away also. We mostly use Zulu (GMT) for that kind of thing, but it still sometimes must be represented as local time, which results in weird effects around the change.
I'd like to be clear - most of your essays are thoughtful, but talking about "30 deaths" as something that is trivial to ignore when most of what you spent the prior paragraph praising are nice-to-have trivialities in and of themselves lost me right then and there. Please, feel free to send an email to the families of those folks thanking them for their sacrifice for a sunny sixth inning at Yankee Stadium and see how they feel. I, for one, would rather not lose those 30 people and tell you to deal with it.*
Long, long ago I remember being told "you'll get that hour back" when complaining about "springing forward", being told "but you'll get that hour back in the fall", and wanting interest for my trouble. (I suppose we could call that interest February 29, due to getting the payment late?)
I actually don't give a rip whether we end up on permanent DST or permanent Standard Time. I just want the flipping back and forth to stop.
*It probably doesn't help that I lost my father in a car crash (DST was not implicated, to be fair), but here we are.
He addresses this in the part about the effect of extra darkness during people’s awake hours in the evening. 15-45 minutes of extra darkness for the entire year (and people are more likely to drive drunk in the evening than the morning) more than offsets the 30 deaths during the actual time change.
And 30 deaths really is a small number - lawnmowers kill 90 people a year.
As we approach the shortest day here the sun goes down about 4:30 and it gets dark about 5pm. We've had a spate of pedestrians getting hit in crosswalks walking home from work in the dark.
Well, Nate, either you don't have animals or yours adjust to time changes twice a year one heck of lot better than mine do. I don't care if we stay on Standard Time or switch to Daylight Time permanently or even if we move the clock by 30 minutes and call it even, as long as we quit changing the clocks twice a year. Hard to imagine that someone as smart as you are thinks that changing our clocks twice a year is a good idea or that somehow it changes how much daylight we get to enjoy. It isn't and it doesn't. (With apologies to Benjamin Franklin. He was a pretty smart guy, except for that cockamamie idea of changing sleep schedules to align with the sun. Clearly he did not have pets.)
Yeah, I'm guessing from his comments about calling people "losers" for needing time and sleep to adjust to clock changes that he's on the far end of the bell curve as far as adjusting.
From a purely hedonistic perspective, maximizing the hours of “waking daylight” may not be an obvious benefit in all climates (including HI and AZ). While New York Nate may enjoy “those glorious summer evenings” in the Big Apple, Las Vegas Nate likely delights in the after-sunset cool of a Sin City summer.
That's why I think that the US should just allow each state to determine it's timezone. Under current timezones, permanent DST in Boston may make sense, but permanent standard time in Detroit may make sense.
Hawaii is very close to the equator and doesn’t have a lot of seasonal variance in sunrise and sunset so they can get away with it. Nate is right, evening daylight is the best - why would you want to take that away in exchange for having the sun rise at 4:30am?
Yeah. I can't open my shades while I'm dressing because people would see me from the road. If kids are going to school in the dark: set the time in the light!!!!!!! People figured this out JUST FINE before World War I when they started DST so they could conscript people because they'd shown the government controlled everything about them.
nice detailed analysis. FWIW I I lived in China for two years and they don't change time, and the whole country is in the same time zone, which was imposed to make coordinating things easier, at the expense of some wacky sunrise times for a lot of people. Didn't really seem to bother anyone, and might even be sensible given how much of the country is rural and is running on 'when the sun rises' local time anyway.
The whole thing reminds me of a silly Simpsons episode where the nerds take over and impose 'decimal time' on Springfield.
Less sunlight in the evening in the summer in Dallas or Phoenix sounds like a good deal. My personal gripe is just shifting the clocks. Pick one and go with it.
You're really understating the harms of clock-shifting and don't seem to realize how disruptive it is for many people.
I'm one of the "losers" you mention who is easily disrupted by a one-hour shift! It sounds like you are on the far side of the bell curve in terms of easily adjusting to a time shift. Most of us are not like that.
The big missing thing in an analysis like this is how brutal the hourly time change is for parents of babies and toddlers. Anyone who has children knows that shifting all schedules by an hour for a child that has no concept of a clock is a disaster.
Forget kids ------------- what about all those angry cats? And disappointed dogs making sad faces when you drag in late with the feed dish, by their timekeeping, which is excellent. And don't talk to me about cows ---- I think dairy farmers just switch themselves; you can't really switch the cows.
This is a problem between the working class and the symbolic capitalists. Factory workers, farmers, truck drivers, and many others have to wake up long before 7 am to start their day. They usually start working between 630 and 700 am. They don't stay out late because they don't have that privilege. So it all depends on what world you are living in as to which one of these affects you more.
What are you talking about? I regularly start work at 630am - I'm a shift worker, ostensibly one of those 'working class' people without 'staying out late privilege', and we all stay out late, all the time. We all take advantage of DST. If you're in bed by 11pm or so, you're generally fine for a 630 start the next morning. What utter nonsense.
Really? How many hours of work per day is that? Is 8 or 12? I guess it depends on the type of work you do. There's a big difference between working at the gas station and manual labor. There's also a difference if you have kids, if you have money to blow, if you are young, and/or if you are a good worker or have a stressful job. Lots of little details. But sure, you are the representative, I guess 😏
I'm not sure it is. For night owls DST still is mandated early waking by shifting clocks later. The only people that tolerate that are actually morning people.
As a resident of Indiana, I find it funny how we live in the same time zone as New York and the times you claim would be pretty terrible are basically my lived experience. I very much enjoy my late sunsets in the Summer though, and I would be totally in favor of permanent DST.
I always hate to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but this controversy always bores me. The planet has a 23-degree axial tilt, which will always create problems if we insist on living life identically in summer and winter, especially in extreme latitudes. A nine- or ten-hour workday in the summer and six or seven in the winter is how we tended to live before clocks.
The assumption underlying your article is that maximizing time awake during daylight is always good.
That is the wrong approach. There is ample science showing that very late sunsets disrupt our sleep patterns, leading to a cacophony of other health problems. This is what we get with the current DST, and we get that sleep disruption for months every summer.
Also, waking up to a long period of darkness is very detrimental to mental and physical health. This is all well documented by a host of scientific studies. This would be a byproduct of permanent DST, we'd get this in the winter.
We should not be optimizing for "more waking daylight". We should be optimizing for a healthy and productive country. That means daylight at the right time, and darkness at the right time.
Permanent STANDARD time is the way to get closer to this.
This is the unusual situation in which "think of the children" is a fair response, I think. Here in Michigan, on the western edge of the eastern time zone, kids already spend the month of October (before the shift to standard time) walking to school in the dark; and there's only about a week of light before the shortening days make it pitch black again. With permanent DST, we'd have weeks of sunrises around 9 am, and dark mornings for most of the school year. And it's no fun trying to get young kids to bed in the summer when it's still not just light, but bright, and will be for hours. This shouldn't be optimized for baseball fans and pub crawls...
"This shouldn't be optimized for baseball fans and pub crawls..."
Or the sugar lobby, which pushed for DST to extend into early November so Halloween could have more daylight, therefore more trick-or-treating.
DST was extended past Halloween to allow children to complete their trick-or-treating in daylight over much of the country. It had nothing to do with any "sugar lobby ".
Oh, God. I totally believe you, too. [:(
Sunrise in Grand Rapids on October 17 is still before 8am. If kids spend the month of October walking to school in the dark, that is a sign that school starts way too early, not that daylight savings time is the issue.
And to be clear Nate is not advocating permanent DST - he’s saying the current system is good, but that if people are totally averse to changing clocks that permanent DST is better than permanent standard time.
And there’s plenty of science behind later school starts being good for kids, particularly teenagers.
There’s no health benefit to darkness at 10 pm. There is health benefit to darkness a few hours before you sleep. It doesn’t matter what number we call the time that sun sets or that we sleep, it just matters that they line up ok.
I often think it would be best for everyone everywhere in the world to just use Greenwich mean time year round and then let local communities decide what hour school and work and other things like that start.
Yes, and kids basically all have delayed sleep phase in today's world so it really puts a squeeze on sleep to move the clock relative to sunset. I think most people don't understand that (or don't care).
Sure, you could create your own timezone by sleeping whenever you want, obviously. But schools and workplaces generally have fixed schedules, so we're locked in by that. If the sun sets too late, there is no option to stay up later, and wake up later, to make up for it.
Schools and workplaces generally have fixed schedules. But they choose those schedules locally, with the input of local people who have seen the sun rise and set. There is no law that business needs to start at 7 am or whatever, or that school needs to stop at 4 pm. By having a single global time zone (or China’s single national time zone) you make it explicit that local businesses and schools set it in a way that makes sense for them. If the Sun sets late, they will choose later schedules. If the Sun sets early, they will choose earlier schedules.
I mean, I've pointed out to friends that while e.g. Florida can't go to permanent DST, they could have the effect of doing so by just saying "...and when Standard Time is in effect, everything the state does shifts by an hour to compensate."
China is not a good reference point. Yes, one time zone despite a huge longitudinal spread, but schools generally start at the same across the country. So the type of societal adaptation you're talking about, well it just doesn't happen. Instead, you have REALLY misaligned schedules in different parts of the country. Terrible system.
The clock is based off the sundial. Noon is the middle of the day when the sun is highest. Midnight is 12 hours away from that. It's a simple measurement that everyone can relate to. Time zones keep us roughly aligned to that.
I've lived a number of years in China, including way out west, and that hasn't been my personal experience.
There's a time-wise gravitational pull towards the East that's a bit more pronounced than what you would think of for Californians who work for firms whose business basically needs to respect East Coast open and closing hours, but I think that also reflects that China's population is much more concentrated in the East than the US's.
Obviously, my personal experience might've been very oblivious. But I'm fluent in Chinese. But in order to accept this, I would need to see some serious articles that weren't just China-bashing journalists.
Yeah, Nate is just completely wrong on this. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine strongly opposes DST, because there's broad agreement that forcing lots of people to wake up when it's still dark is quite bad for public health.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7954020/
So true. I know it's bad for me: has been, all my life.
It's not just about light. They really are simply forced to wake earlier relative to sun and social signals. I don't get why that's by far the least talked about issue. It's about forcing earlier sleep taking by definition yet somehow people exclusively talk about light levels. I don't get it.
Here's a good summary on why permanent standard time is the better option: https://ai.hubermanlab.com/s/26S9LNp1
Cheeseburgers are not good for our health either. We gonna ban those next? If the minority of people like more sun in the evening, is there some reason we should impose something they don’t want on them? Cannot people choose the less healthy option if they want? Isn’t that part of the American ethos?
In greater Atlanta, DST goes too late into the year. The week before we fall back, the sun doesn’t rise until almost 8. I would prefer falling back 15 minutes every two weeks beginning the first weekend after the equinox, and doing that 4 times.
Public health not improving their reputation as killjoys... 😂
Giving kids a later deadline to wake is not killjoy imo.
I'm confused, doesn't putting the sunrise earlier (as standard time would do) nudge us all to be virtuous early risers? I'm all for a later deadline to wake, but universal standard time seems like an earlier one.
Nope. First think of sunset, if you delay that on the clock, you're delaying melatonin which conflicts with social wake time being an hour earlier. Now when people are up earlier it's still dark so that also delays the suppression of melatonin to signal the day started. Humans are meant to sleep through the transition to sunrise, it's artificially shifting the clock that reduces our ability to get enough sleep. Keep in mind kids already have a delayed sleep phase from modern life so DST puts an even worse squeeze on their sleep. It's the time relative to the sun that matters. That's why DST really is a preference of early risers that can easily adjust. The emphasis on morning lighting is a bit of bad messaging from standard time advocates in my opinion.
@Morris — yep, exactly right. If maximizing total hours of very bright light during the day is the goal, then we should be going around giving people 10,000 lux lamps to keep on 24 hours a day. Except obviously not, because that's torture.
So the right answer is that people need light at some times and darkness at other times. If you have total control over your work hours, you can do whatever you want to get this light/dark balance. But for people who have to get up early for work or school, permanent DST makes it so the distribution of light over the course of the day has too little light in the morning and too much light in the latter half of the day, delaying melatonin rhythms, messing up sleep, etc.
> There is ample science showing that very late sunsets disrupt our sleep patterns, leading to a cacophony of other health problems.
Is this the same "science" that tells us blue light is bad and dark mode is beneficial to your eyes?
My fellow light mode traveler!
And Red Wine is either bad or good for you, depending on the half-year we are in.
Personally I would prefer year-round standard time, but failing that year-round DST.
What he said.
You must not live in a northern city. Standard time in summer in Seattle would result in crazy early sunrise, also screwing with people’s natural rhythms. If it gets light in my bedroom at 4 am when I’m trying g to sleep, that’s gotta have negative health consequences as well.
How about pointing to such a study?
Here's a paper that summarizes a lot of it: https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
That's basically an opinion piece masquerading as a scientific research paper. The scientific data around this is actually fairly thin - there has been exactly one study, conducted in 2014 in Northern Russia (a place of extreme time variations to begin with) around the differences between permanent DST and permanent ST. The rest is theory.
This also assumes that physical health is the only factor. There is evidence that psychological health is improved with more daylight, and that more daylight is better for the economy, and that people's sense of life satisfaction is improved with more daylight hours in the evenings, when they have time. It's not as cut and dry as you make it out to be.
Finally, as mentioned above, only one small study has been done on the effects of permanent DST vs permanent ST. The rest is based on research around social jetlag in general, and I don't think whether we go permanent ST or permanent DST will solve that. I have to wake up before the sun rises for work no matter the season - and I go to bed when it's dark no matter the season. Changing the clocks will not magically get rid of social jetlag - only cultural changes that align work and school with the sun will do that.
Hey, its a winner for Nate's actual worst take. The politics stuff is fine.
I do think you criminally downplay the cost of the switching. Its not just a "few car accidents". There is evidence for health impacts, energy cost, sleep risks, and health risks (yes, I am putting it in twice). JHU is oddly in favor of removing the swap, but permanent standard time (see link below).
I also think you make a point you skip over that people adopt habits to their sunlight options. So overall people would likely create patterns based on sunlight available and then we can still get rid of the plan to deal with switching.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/7-things-to-know-about-daylight-saving-time
Agreed - it's his worst take.
The cost of the switching is huge on people's health.
You missed the part about the effect of extra darkness during people’s awake hours in the evening. 15-45 minutes of extra darkness for the entire year (and people are more likely to drive drunk in the evening than the morning) more than offsets the 30 deaths during the actual time change
That's assuming its 30 deaths. He hand waves all the other impacts and lumps it into "30 traffic fatalities". Its part of why I added JHU's work, since I assume a large public health group would have a better take.
I'm not perfectly sure that dismissing some deaths as not something that matters is sufficiently "woke" for a Democrat and Harris voter --------- maybe needs thot. Well, if it's just white male Trump voters, I suppose it would be a GOOD thing to have deaths, twice as many would be better, no doubt, but probably people suffer from moving the clocks wildly around without reference to political party.
Huh. Maybe now it's rightwing because maybe Trump likes it -------- that would make DST twice yearly time change popular with Dems.
You realize this has nothing at all to do with science, or anything at all except who has and who gets the Power to control the people.
I'm definitely on the permanent DST train (as opposed to permanent standard time), but either one would be better than the constant swapping back and forth. I switched to personal permanent DST back in 2021 and it has been the best thing ever.
Interested in how that works...you're self-employed with no kids, I'm guessing?
No kids and work has common "overlap hours" when meetings are scheduled during the middle of the day due to people working in multiple timezones.
I suspect kids would be hard, but I'm in a similar boat and you don't need all the way to self-employed to be able to do this, although your life does need some flexibility.
I have friends in China I call at a regular hour THEIR evening (so my morning in the US), several times a week and we have dinner/breakfast "together."
For me that's enough to keep me getting up and going to bed at the same solar time. For part of the year I have an extra hour before heading out the door, and another part of the year I have an extra hour when I come home before going to bed, and that's an hour I just fill in with fun stuff, and this hour of entertainment is the thing I swap around rather than sleep.
I agree, anything is better than changing the clock.
How did you personally switch?
Worked with my manager to basically just adjust my work hours at time change so that effectively I don't change.
But do you keep your watch and computer on standard time, etc.?
I would so do that if I could. Bravo. You are truly free.
You do realize that a) the vast majority of Americans despise the time change, and b) we really did live without it for a very long time. And the American people survived.
Let's be honest -- you live in NYC and you like the current system. That's your preference. All the rest of what you wrote is a huge pointless diatribe. The answer to the problem is one single nationwide time zone system that does not change twice a year, and allow states to choose which zone they want to be in (within geographic reason).
Latitudinal differences in hours of sunlight and sunrise/sunset are a fact of planetary science, and we can try to fight it with policy, but at the end of the day (pun intended), the upshot of your research is that whatever happens, some people will complain. So let's let the democratic process handle this one.
“a) the vast majority of Americans despise the time change, and b) we really did live without it for a very long time. And the American people survived.”
I take it *you* realize that in the 70s we stopped switching, but people hated the change so we went back? “We’d survive” is not the right question; the right question is would we be happy with what we got?
This is the kicker to me. It's easy to pretend now that stopping the switch would be better...but we already tried it before and people hated it.
The world is different now. The big complaint in the 70s was that kids were off to school in the dark. Well, my kids are off to school in the dark today because school starts so damn early. That argument isn't the same now as it was in the 70s as that's true for many people.
I have seen the late sunrise argument brought up in every single reddit post, article, etc. about this issue whenever it is brought up so I think the argument is very much still relevant now.
People hate *everything*.
And they hate change even more.
But what if the change is to stop changing? People won't know what to do with that.
Change: you gotta hate it.
Seems to me that the time change might be like elections. The people who really hated changing, all rallied, wrote letters, donated cash. They succeeded in getting the switch eliminated. Then, the people who want the change and earlier daylight in winter were all aggrieved. They rallied, wrote letters, and donated money. They then won and got it changed back. In elections the people who do t have power want it and work harder to get back in. The people in power get complacent. Seems exactly like the time change elimination experiment. Currently, the people who hate changing are the aggrieved ones and are fighting harder.
3 things: first, the switch was to permanent DST, not permanent standard; second, it was forced nationwide, and third, it was always intended as temporary, we didn't "go back because people hated it."
People will complain about *any* policy change, then they adapt, as individuals and as state/local governments (look at Obamacare for an example). Social security was deeply unpopular when it was first implemented.
Schools and employers will adjust schedules, organizations and sports clubs adjust meeting/game times, etc. On balance, the data indicate that the time change does more harm than good. One single national time that allows states some leeway to choose their zone would likely be the best option. And I'm personally in favor of permanent standard time.
Getting rid of DST and maintaining standard time as the, well, standard, is one of the few good ideas this bunch of low wattage "thinkers" have had. If you're worried about missing daylight, get up earlier and leave the rest of us that would prefer not being forced to deal with increased risk of heart attacks and strokes, sleep disruption, mood disturbances, higher rates of car accidents, cognitive impairment, digestive issues, and overall disruption to the body's natural circadian rhythm twice every year alone. Compared to that, loosing a mere 40 minutes of daylight seems like the bargain of the millennia. DST made some degree of sense when the world was mostly rural and agrarian, but now that that time has past, DST is an idea that has outlived its usefulness in the industrialized nations.
Daylight before work is much less valuable than daylight after work. Getting up early doesn’t solve the “I want it to be light out when I go for a walk after dinner” problem.
Listen to how superficial and selfish that complaint is when it's to justify a blanket mandate of earlier waking on everyone else. Basically turning 7am into 6am for school kids.
It actually made no sense when the world was rural and agrarian either. DST was designed to save lighting costs (first kerosene and then electricity). Ask any dairy farmer whether the cows obey the clock or the sun and you'll understand why the idea that DST was supposed to help ag interests is ridiculous.
It was designed to control people so they would submit to conscription and fighting overseas in a war that was none of our business and everyone knew it in 1917.
Hey, if the government even controls our TIME, it controls everything.
And all the drama with computers and logging goes away also. We mostly use Zulu (GMT) for that kind of thing, but it still sometimes must be represented as local time, which results in weird effects around the change.
Nate,
I'd like to be clear - most of your essays are thoughtful, but talking about "30 deaths" as something that is trivial to ignore when most of what you spent the prior paragraph praising are nice-to-have trivialities in and of themselves lost me right then and there. Please, feel free to send an email to the families of those folks thanking them for their sacrifice for a sunny sixth inning at Yankee Stadium and see how they feel. I, for one, would rather not lose those 30 people and tell you to deal with it.*
Long, long ago I remember being told "you'll get that hour back" when complaining about "springing forward", being told "but you'll get that hour back in the fall", and wanting interest for my trouble. (I suppose we could call that interest February 29, due to getting the payment late?)
I actually don't give a rip whether we end up on permanent DST or permanent Standard Time. I just want the flipping back and forth to stop.
*It probably doesn't help that I lost my father in a car crash (DST was not implicated, to be fair), but here we are.
I’ve always been grateful that the government gave us the full hour back in the fall, rather than trying to take its usual 30% cut!
Underrated comment.
He addresses this in the part about the effect of extra darkness during people’s awake hours in the evening. 15-45 minutes of extra darkness for the entire year (and people are more likely to drive drunk in the evening than the morning) more than offsets the 30 deaths during the actual time change.
And 30 deaths really is a small number - lawnmowers kill 90 people a year.
“And 30 deaths really is a small number - lawnmowers kill 90 people a year.”
Wait for the AI lawnmower revolt! It will go way up! 😆
As we approach the shortest day here the sun goes down about 4:30 and it gets dark about 5pm. We've had a spate of pedestrians getting hit in crosswalks walking home from work in the dark.
Well, Nate, either you don't have animals or yours adjust to time changes twice a year one heck of lot better than mine do. I don't care if we stay on Standard Time or switch to Daylight Time permanently or even if we move the clock by 30 minutes and call it even, as long as we quit changing the clocks twice a year. Hard to imagine that someone as smart as you are thinks that changing our clocks twice a year is a good idea or that somehow it changes how much daylight we get to enjoy. It isn't and it doesn't. (With apologies to Benjamin Franklin. He was a pretty smart guy, except for that cockamamie idea of changing sleep schedules to align with the sun. Clearly he did not have pets.)
Yeah, I'm guessing from his comments about calling people "losers" for needing time and sleep to adjust to clock changes that he's on the far end of the bell curve as far as adjusting.
As far as I can tell Arizona and Hawaii seem to be perfectly fine.
If you get up at 6 am you're getting ready for work in total darkness anyway during the winter.
From a purely hedonistic perspective, maximizing the hours of “waking daylight” may not be an obvious benefit in all climates (including HI and AZ). While New York Nate may enjoy “those glorious summer evenings” in the Big Apple, Las Vegas Nate likely delights in the after-sunset cool of a Sin City summer.
That's why I think that the US should just allow each state to determine it's timezone. Under current timezones, permanent DST in Boston may make sense, but permanent standard time in Detroit may make sense.
Hawaii is very close to the equator and doesn’t have a lot of seasonal variance in sunrise and sunset so they can get away with it. Nate is right, evening daylight is the best - why would you want to take that away in exchange for having the sun rise at 4:30am?
I would actually prefer permanent savings tome, so the sun rising at 8 am in the winter.
Because it's done by mandating earlier waking. It's weird that's not part of anyone's reasoning or consideration.
Yeah. I can't open my shades while I'm dressing because people would see me from the road. If kids are going to school in the dark: set the time in the light!!!!!!! People figured this out JUST FINE before World War I when they started DST so they could conscript people because they'd shown the government controlled everything about them.
nice detailed analysis. FWIW I I lived in China for two years and they don't change time, and the whole country is in the same time zone, which was imposed to make coordinating things easier, at the expense of some wacky sunrise times for a lot of people. Didn't really seem to bother anyone, and might even be sensible given how much of the country is rural and is running on 'when the sun rises' local time anyway.
The whole thing reminds me of a silly Simpsons episode where the nerds take over and impose 'decimal time' on Springfield.
Yeah, but that's just because China doesn't care about the rural yokels in West China. The important rich parts of China are all in the east.
Less sunlight in the evening in the summer in Dallas or Phoenix sounds like a good deal. My personal gripe is just shifting the clocks. Pick one and go with it.
You're really understating the harms of clock-shifting and don't seem to realize how disruptive it is for many people.
I'm one of the "losers" you mention who is easily disrupted by a one-hour shift! It sounds like you are on the far side of the bell curve in terms of easily adjusting to a time shift. Most of us are not like that.
Amen. Drives me crazy. Takes me weeks. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it . . . . . . .
The big missing thing in an analysis like this is how brutal the hourly time change is for parents of babies and toddlers. Anyone who has children knows that shifting all schedules by an hour for a child that has no concept of a clock is a disaster.
Forget kids ------------- what about all those angry cats? And disappointed dogs making sad faces when you drag in late with the feed dish, by their timekeeping, which is excellent. And don't talk to me about cows ---- I think dairy farmers just switch themselves; you can't really switch the cows.
Can confirm: dairy farmers switch themselves, because dawn is dawn and the cows get milked at dawn. The cows do not care at all what the clock says.
I'm reading this article a month late, but this was my exact thought throughout.
Before kids, I was reasonably indifferent to this debate, time changes were annoying but just in a minor inconvenience sort of way when entering DST.
Now with small children it can easily make our carefully maintained bedtime and morning routines a total mess for a week or so.
This is a problem between the working class and the symbolic capitalists. Factory workers, farmers, truck drivers, and many others have to wake up long before 7 am to start their day. They usually start working between 630 and 700 am. They don't stay out late because they don't have that privilege. So it all depends on what world you are living in as to which one of these affects you more.
What are you talking about? I regularly start work at 630am - I'm a shift worker, ostensibly one of those 'working class' people without 'staying out late privilege', and we all stay out late, all the time. We all take advantage of DST. If you're in bed by 11pm or so, you're generally fine for a 630 start the next morning. What utter nonsense.
Really? How many hours of work per day is that? Is 8 or 12? I guess it depends on the type of work you do. There's a big difference between working at the gas station and manual labor. There's also a difference if you have kids, if you have money to blow, if you are young, and/or if you are a good worker or have a stressful job. Lots of little details. But sure, you are the representative, I guess 😏
I'm not sure it is. For night owls DST still is mandated early waking by shifting clocks later. The only people that tolerate that are actually morning people.
As a resident of Indiana, I find it funny how we live in the same time zone as New York and the times you claim would be pretty terrible are basically my lived experience. I very much enjoy my late sunsets in the Summer though, and I would be totally in favor of permanent DST.
I always hate to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but this controversy always bores me. The planet has a 23-degree axial tilt, which will always create problems if we insist on living life identically in summer and winter, especially in extreme latitudes. A nine- or ten-hour workday in the summer and six or seven in the winter is how we tended to live before clocks.
There is no s at the end of Saving. Just to be that guy...
Oh you address that in the footnote.