Costs of daylight savings time

Putting the clocks forward tonight might be expensive in terms of health, wealth and happiness, according to three separate pieces of research.

First, Laurence Jin and Nicolas Ziebarth have found “evidence of mild negative health effects when clocks are set forward one hour in spring”: in Germany, hospital admissions increase after the clocks go forward in the spring and fall when they go back in the autumn. This is consistent with the possibility that the extra hour’s sleep in the autumn improves our health whilst the loss thereof in the spring worsens it.

Secondly, there’s this (pdf):

Individuals in both the UK and Germany experience deteriorations in life satisfaction in the first week after the spring transition…We attribute the negative effect of the spring transition to the reduction in the time endowment and the process of adjusting to the disruption in circadian rhythms. The effects are particularly strong for individuals with young children in the household.

Thirdly, Mark Kamstra and colleagues have found that stock markets do badly around the time of daylight savings changes. In the UK, the spring DST weekend has seen the All-share index fall by an average of 0.4%, compared to a drop of less than 0.1% in ordinary weekends. This is consistent with the possibility that disruptions to our sleep patterns increase anxiety.

You might object that these findings suffer from p-value fetishism and publication bias. If you do, you might cite this as support: it finds no evidence that DST affects risk appetite or cognitive performance.

Personally, I have an open mind about these effects. I do suspect, however, that it might be more intelligent to change the hours we work than the clocks.

Comments

[Peter Dorman]

The problem with changing hours of work rather than clocks is like the problem with changing domestic prices rather than exchange rates.

BTW, is there any evidence for reciprocal gains due to that extra hour in the fall? Personally, I find the loss of an hour slightly annoying and its return slightly beneficial, overall a wash.

[Rich]

The whole thing is stupid. In China/Japan they don't do it and seem to get on fine.

[Dave Timoney]

@Rich, China and Japan are further south than the UK (London is 51°N, Beijing 40°N and Tokyo 35°N), so it's less of an issue for them. The tropics (23°N & S) are pretty much the limit for DST.

In the UK, the greatest support for DST has usually come from the north. If Scotland eventually declares independence, there will probably be revived interest south of the border in abandoning DST, which would mean crossing a timezone just past Berwick.

[Peter Out]

Clocks forward, clocks back, tick tock, tock tick. Does one hour, here or there, really make any difference? Wasn't it because some efficiency nut in England during WW1 wanted to improve war production efficiency?
Why not put a stop to it once and for all.
We simply forward clock half an hour back, or a backward clock half wan hour forward, and never change them again.
The puny error of half an hour will soon be absorbed by humanity, and perhaps every few thousand years it will be be necessary to adjust the world's clocks to their nearest half an hour, just to get them right again, and so on.

[Miguel Madeira]

My impression (from Portugal, but I have also that impression from things that I read in international blogs) is that most people seems to prefer the Daylight Saving Time to the regular time; most arguments "against" or in "favour" of DST seems to be things like "DST is bad because I don't like to leave the job at night" or "DST is good for the children not going to school at night" (of course, these arguments are not really about DST - they are about the regular time, meaning that almost everybody likes to have the DST in the summer, and the real polemic is if we should have the DST only in the summer or in all the year).

[aragon]

I hate the changing of the clocks for DST, and would like to see it abolished.

The time is determined by astronomy, GMT has the sun overhead at noon, at Greenwich meridian.

Some people may have a preference for more daylight in the evening, or for been on Central European Time or CET (GMT+1 and DST) or even GMT+2.

GMT centers the available light around the middle of the day, for the Greenwich meridian (longitude 0), and is therefore the logical choice not favoring the evenings. The days are already longer in the summer.

GMT+1 would move daybreak from 9am to 10am (11am for GMT+2) in parts of Scotland in the winter.

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/daylight-saving-debate.html

"Studies show that there is an increase in both heart attacks and road accidents on the days after clocks are set forward one hour in the spring."

I am for GMT all year round, abandon this ritual of changing the time.

[gastro george]

I've never been quite sure why people in parts of Scotland don't just get up an hour later in the winter. Unless they're worried about missing Breakfast TV.

[Tin Cup NYC]

Most people do not get enough sleep as it is, so this clock setting and resetting cannot be good for us.

[Pissed off Wage Slave]

My main reason for being depressed after the clocks go forward is having to return to work after a short break. It is the Monday morning feeling, only worse.

If I didn't have to return to work the whole clock setting palaver would be irrelevant.

So time isn't the problem, work is.

[Sam]

"Personally, I have an open mind about these effects. I do suspect, however, that it might be more intelligent to change the hours we work than the clocks."

That's exactly what we do. If you call "the clock" UTC, or TAI, then we don't change it. We merely change the time that we all, by convention, go to work, school and so on, and we indicate this convention by relabelling the time.

[Luis Enrique]

also: causes car crash fatalities

https://www.aeaweb.org/atypon.php?return_to=/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20140100&etoc=1