Nov 12, JDN 2458069

As I write this, Daylight Savings Time has just ended.

Sleep deprivation costs the developed world about 2% of GDP—on the order of $1 trillion per year. The US alone loses enough productivity from sleep deprivation that recovering this loss would give us enough additional income to end world hunger.

So, naturally, we have a ritual every year where we systematically impose an hour of sleep deprivation on the entire population for six months. This makes sense somehow.
The start of Daylight Savings Time each year is associated with a spike in workplace injuries, heart attacks, and suicide.

Nor does the “extra” hour of sleep we get in the fall compensate; in fact, it comes with its own downsides. Pedestrian fatalities spike immediately after the end of Daylight Savings Time; the rate of assault also rises at the end of DST, though it does also seem to fall when DST starts.

Daylight Savings Time was created to save energy. It does do that… technically. The total energy savings for the United States due to DST amounts to about 0.3% of our total electricity consumption. In some cases it can even increase energy use, though it does seem to smooth out electricity consumption over the day in a way that is useful for solar and wind power.

But this is a trivially small amount of energy savings, and there are far better ways to achieve it.

Simply due to new technologies and better policies, manufacturing in the US has reduced its energy costs per dollar of output by over 4% in the last few years. Simply getting all US states to use energy as efficiently as it is used in New York or California (not much climate similarity between those two states, but hmm… something about politics comes to mind…) would cut our energy consumption by about 30%.

The total amount of energy saved by DST is comparable to the amount of electricity now produced by small-scale residential photovoltaics—so simply doubling residential solar power production (which we’ve been doing every few years lately) would yield the same benefits as DST without the downsides. If we really got serious about solar power and adopted the policies necessary to get a per-capita solar power production comparable to Germany (not a very sunny place, mind you—Sacramento gets over twice the hours of sun per year that Berlin does), we would increase our solar power production by a factor of 10—five times the benefits of DST, none of the downsides.

Alternatively we could follow France’s model and get serious about nuclear fission. France produces over three hundred times as much energy from nuclear power as the US saves via Daylight Savings Time. Not coincidentally, France produces half as much CO2 per dollar of GDP as the United States.

Why would we persist in such a ridiculous policy, with such terrible downsides and almost no upside? To a first approximation, all human behavior is social norms.