Government in our Bedrooms

Not another abortion post -- I'm talking about alarm clocks.

Only government could spend 90 years tinkering with the clocks, with no proof of efficacy

Michael Downing has written a book, and a guest editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. He considers Daylight Savings Time "a cynical substitute for sensible energy policy. Even if we all eat breakfast in the dark in March and November, we won't save much oil because less than 5% of domestic electricity is generated by oil. We will consume more gasoline. When Americans go to the ballpark or the mall, we hop in our cars."

While ThreeSources farmer JohnGalt came out for it last year, Downing claims it was a political triumph of city merchants over rural farmers, who hated it.

They used morning light to stimulate their dairy and dry dew off their cereal crops. When sunrise arrived an hour later, opening times for city markets didn't change. Farmers had one less hour to deliver the goods. Along with coal miners and clergymen, they complained that daylight saving severed our connection to the sun and God's time.

To appease the rural interests, Congress repealed daylight saving in 1919. Only another world war persuaded Congress to try it again. The Roosevelt administration claimed that War Time -- the year-round daylight saving that lasted from January 1942 until September 1945 -- reduced energy consumption by many kilowatts. This was harder to substantiate, however, than newspaper photographs of schoolchildren waiting for buses at trafficky intersections on dark winter mornings. And the farmers still hated it. Congress did not dare to pass a peacetime daylight saving law until 1966.

New York City was not cowed. Urban merchants had profited by daylight saving, and Wall Street wanted it after World War I because London had it, which put London six hours ahead of New York. Stock markets in both cities were open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Without daylight saving, their trading hours didn't overlap, and they had no opportunity for arbitrage.

I had always though Silence's hero, Ben Franklin, was to blame, but his name or century fail to come up in this account:

William Willett proposed the idea of falsifying clock time in 1907. A golfer, hunter and horseman, Willett was trotting through London at dawn and noticed that windows were shuttered, blocking the summer sun. He wanted to shift that unused hour of daylight from morning to evening, when people could spend it on leisure, including increased "opportunities for rifle practice." Parliament repeatedly shouted down Willett's proposal. But in May 1916, with World War I underway, Germany adopted daylight saving, hoping later sunsets would reduce demand for electric illumination. In response, Britain immediately passed the 1916 Daylight Saving Act as an austerity measure. It wasn't easy to squeeze a lump of coal out of a clock, but this siphoned the fun from Willett's idea.

President Nixon brought it back full time for two years, now they're at it again. If nobody can show any proof that it works, should we not just leave the clocks alone?

Posted by jk at March 31, 2006 11:11 AM