Ignoring Planetary Reality in the Name of Global Commerce

If The Atlantic‘s advice is taken, this could be Los Angeles’ view at 9 in the morning. (cc photo: Eric Chan)

Here are some words that are missing from economist Allison Schrager’s Atlantic piece (11/1/13) proposing the abolition of Daylight Savings Time and the reduction of the contiguous United States to two time zones:

sunlight, season, summer, winter, sunrise, sunset

In other words, virtually all the words that would explain why we have Daylight Savings Time and time zones in the first place.

Freed from the physical reality that places the United States in the temperate zone of a tilted planet, Schrager is free to reorganize regional schedules in the name of “economic efficiency” without regard to what this would actually do to people’s lives. She wisely declines to describe the results of her scheme, maybe realizing that the idea of putting the West Coast permanently on what is now Central Standard Time would have limited appeal had she spelled out that in mid-December, the Sun would rise at 8:58 am in Los Angeles,  9:51 pm in Portland and 9:58 am in Seattle.

Schrager does have one nod to the human cost of ignoring what the Sun is doing when deciding how to set our clocks:

It’s true that larger time zones would seem to cheat many people out of daylight by removing them further from their true solar time. But the demands of global commerce already do that.

And who are mere humans to resist the demands of global commerce?

CORRECTION: This article originally set the clocks on the West Coast back two hours, rather than ahead two hours, which is the actual proposal. It also missed that the Atlantic article was two years old.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

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