Daylight Savings Time is a Crock

Once again, Freakonomics is there to tell us how it really is. Thanks to Freakonomics blogger Stephen J. Dubner for finding this article providing good science in support of the notion that Daylight Savings Time is, in fact, a crock and a waste.

It's an interesting premise, but sadly a bit of a boring read unless you're really in to quantitative analysis where the bulk of the writing is just explaining the methodology behind the research; it's important for good science, but painful to read. In a nutshell, these Ph.D. types reminded us all that, contrary to popular belief, Daylight Savings Time isn't about agriculture at all, but it's supposedly about keeping energy costs down by playing with the energy demand.

They did a study of Indiana who until recently left it up to the individual counties to decide whether they would practice DST. What's more, the poor hoosiers have the time zone divide going right down the middle of their state. Anyway, because they recently passed a law that all counties had to practice DST, they have a pretty good natural laboratory to compare average energy consumption.

Our main finding is that—contrary to the policy’s intent—DST results is an overall increase
in residential electricity demand. Estimates of the overall increase in consumption are
approximately 1 percent and highly statistically significant. We also find that the effect is not
constant throughout the DST period: there is some evidence for an increase in electricity demand at the spring transition into DST, but the real increases come in the fall when DST appears to increase consumption between 2 and 4 percent.

On a personal level, I've never liked the time change because I find the abrupt transition to standard time in the fall a bit jarring. It always happens just as the weather's starting to get cooler and the general look of the season a bit more bleak. The sun sits lower in the sky anyway, there are significantly fewer leaves on the trees, it's cold and flu season, etc. My personal favorite is when I arrive at work before the sun's up and don't leave until the sun's down. As a child of summer and something of a sun-worshiper, it's just too much of a change. I'm pretty sure I suffer from seasonal depression anyway and this isn't helping.

But wait: I discovered yet another reason not to love the time change: the Daughter pays more attention to the sun than the clock. So, while "fall back" used to be a refreshing time to get an extra hour of sleep before Sunday's obligations began, this year--the Daughter's first--it became an opportunity to have an extra hour to get ready in the morning as she was up by a little after 6:00 instead of her previous a little after 7:00. Yeesh.

So for those of you who may be struggling to find something to get riled up about now that the elections have come and gone, let's get riled up about this: Down with DST! It has all the components of a great cause: it's easy to put on a bumper sticker, a t-shirt, or a sign to be held up at a rally. You can even apply vague rhetoric to it that sounds profound: "Keep Us Out of the Dark!" "EnLIGHTen America!" What more do you need?