Can’t We Just Stop Resetting Clocks Twice a Year?

This coming weekend, most of the U.S. will add an hour to the clocks for the shift from daylight saving time back to standard time. This is a terrible idea. The switch from daylight saving time (not “savings” time) is part of a ritual of murky origin whose benefits rest on shaky evidence. The reasons nowadays offered for maintaining the shift are spurious. The moment has come to do away with standard time and stay on daylight saving all year round.

Here some history might be instructive. The idea for daylight saving time is usually credited to George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist who gave a paper in 1895 proposing the device as a means to reduce the use of artificial light. His colleagues ridiculed the paper for proposing to overturn the way humans had marked time for millennia. They also claimed that Benjamin Franklin had suggested the same thing more than a century earlier, an assertion that’s often repeated but is probably not true.