By Steve Sailer
11/08/2021
The brouhaha over Daylight Savings Time is a good non-partisan example of how if you are not on the offensive politically, you wind up on the defensive.
Daylight Savings Time is very useful for outdoor exercise in the evenings. An extra hour of recreation outside after school or work is one of the better things in life.
For example, in many places, when DST ends in early November, afterschool soccer practices suddenly become much harder to schedule in leagues where the parents drive the kids to the practice.
America has a big fat obesity problem, so making outdoor exercise harder to get by destroying a successful innovation out of general ignorance strikes me
There have been three improvements and one disaster regarding federal DST legislation since the 1960s. In 1966, a federal law standardized that if a state wanted to use DST (to this day, tropical Hawaii and sun-blasted Arizona, which has got all the daylight it wants, thank you very much, do not), then the 6 months period of DST should begin and end on nationally standardized dates.
This proved popular, so when the Energy Crisis struck in the fall of 1973, Congress, thinking that if 6 months of DST was a good thing, then 12 months would be a great thing, voted year-round DST in 1974. This proved wildly unpopular for highly predictable reasons as soon as it was implemented in January 1974, and Congress quietly got rid of year-round DST later that year.
In 1986, DST backers got Congress to extend DST from six months to seven months, which, among the handful of people who noticed this reform, was popular.
Then in 2005, DST enthusiasts persuaded Congress to extend DST to eight months. Among those of us who have studied the question, that seems like close to the natural maximum length for a country with the latitude of the United States. Hence, there is little in the way of an organized push anymore to extend DST to, say, 9 months, because DST enthusiasts tend also to be DST realists and still remember the disaster of 1974.
With DST close to being optimized, there’s little in the way of an Extend DST Lobby anymore.
But, to misquote Vince Lombardi, the best defense is a good offense. During the eighties into the 2000s, pro-DST was on the offensive, pushing for extending DST. So, the media tended to frame the DST debate as Progressive Reformers vs. Anti-Reform Fuddy Duddies.
But when the pro-DST reformers achieved all they wanted in 2005, and being fairly realistic stopped pushing for more, more, more, the debate in the press began to be reframed as: Don’t You Just Hate the Horrible Burden of Changing Your Clocks Twice Per Year?
There may be general lessons to learn from this history.
If the anti-DST people liked to think about when the sun comes up and sets, they’d realize the only anti-clock change idea that might make any sense is a half hour of DST year-round. But they don’t like to think about sunrises and sunsets, so they don’t.
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