The free world and the hour change
Arvind Ethan David asks why liberal democracies have stuck it out with daylight saving, while authoritarian states have ditched it
I have on my desk a literary digital clock.
No, that's not a hallucination of the AI writing this article. Like Doja Cat, I said what I said: a literary digital clock. It is a gift from my fiancé, a rectangular prism in brass and pixels which displays a block of text on an OCD screen which changes every minute.
This minute, it reads:
A few hours later, at twenty-three minutes past twelve, this same amethyst pendant is discovered clutched in the hand of another man. This is the second undeniable fact.
That quotation from Maurice LeBlanc’s The Golden Triangle, the eighth book in the Arsene Lupin mysteries, is how the clock is telling me that it is currently 12:23 in the afternoon.
When I walked into my office this morning, the clock was busy declaring that:
He’d had this experience only once before. On September 11, 2001, at 8:46 a.m., he’d been at his desk on the top floor of the World Financial Center.
That’s a line from The Big Short, Michael Lewis' angry, funny and deeply depressing explication of the global financial crisis of 2008, subsequently made into a brilliant film by Adam MacKay which memorably features Margot Robbie in a bubble bath.
As I type this, the clock is informing me that, according to Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms:
It was Twelve-thirty-five when they were dismissed.
You are probably getting the point by now.
Given the length of some of the quotations, and then the time taken to look them up or just think about them, I frequently find myself staring at the clock for minutes at a time, enjoying the scroll but wasting the very time I was so anxious to check in the first place.
My experience of the clock reminds me of another literary quotation, this one about digital time-pieces:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The idea that humanity's affection for digital watches is a sign of our primitiveness benefits from some gentle unpicking. Adams, who was fond of explaining his own jokes, is happy to oblige:
Digital watches came along at a time when, in all other areas, we were trying to find ways of translating purely numeric data into graphic form so that the information leapt easily to the eye. For instance, we noticed that pie charts and bar graphs often told us more about the relationships between things than tables of numbers did. So we worked hard to make our computers capable of translating numbers into graphic displays. At the same time, we each had the world's most perfect pie chart machine strapped to our wrists, which we could read at a glance and we suddenly got terribly excited at the idea of translating them back into numeric data simply because we suddenly had the technology to do it. So digital watches were mere technological toys rather than significant improvements on anything that went before.
Adams loved technology and innovation, but he despised innovation for its own sake. In his eminently sensible view, innovation is supposed to improve the lives of those it affects, not just mess with the natural order of things. As the computer scientist Danny Hillis memorably remarked, ‘technology is all the stuff that doesn’t work yet.’
My literary clock fails this test to a ridiculous extreme. The thing is a technological toy entirely for its own sake, and can barely be described as a clock at all. That said, I love it, and suspect Adams would have loved it too. Even more than most writers, he elevated procrastination into an art form, and would have stared at it for hours at end whilst failing to write yet another Hitchhiker novel.
Less lovable is the fact that a few weeks ago, many of us — all of the many hundred millions of us in fact, who live in Europe or North America — had to adjust our clocks to account for Daylight Saving Time (DST). In the US and Canada this happened on 9 March, and in the EU and UK on 30 March — for the 21 days between, all of us who have regular transatlantic calls found ourselves constantly an hour late or early for meetings, and cursing a lot.
In fact, quite a lot of the world is seriously inconvenienced by DST, which is generally regarded as a pretty terrible idea contributing to a variety of serious mental and physical depletions. The American Heart Association reports a startling 24% increase in heart attacks on the Monday following the transition to DST. Similarly, stroke rates are observed to be 8% higher during the first two weeks after the time change. Mental Health also takes a battering — DST causes sleep disruption, depression and seasonal affective disorder. Work place productivity plummets and as anyone with school age children knows, the poor things are put in a state of exhaustion for several weeks as their little bodies get used to what is in effect a bout of parentally enforced jet-lag. These findings are not contentious, being consistent over multiple studies carried out over many years. DST is a terrible idea, despite the fact that J.D.Vance doesn’t like it either.
Given all this, I found myself wondering where the Daylight Saving Monster had come from and why we were all stuck with it. The answers proved rather surprising.
DST was introduced during World War I, as a War Time mechanism to conserve coal and oil consumption when these resources were urgently needed for the war effort. Back in the days, when the most significant source of energy consumption were coal heaters and oil lamps, you can perhaps see the logic in this — but as soon as the war ended our great-grandparents generation recognising DST for the blight on humanity that it is, abolished it globally in the 1920s and 30s.
DST wasn’t done with us though, being reintroduced with a vengeance during World War II, with much the same rationale. Indeed, the UK, not to be outdone by the Americans, doubled down on it (literally) with the practice of ‘Double Summer Time’, i.e. advancing clocks by not one but two hours every summer between 1942-1945. Presumably Churchill must have approved of this, but given he stayed in bed till past 11am most mornings, it probably didn’t affect him much.
This time round though, when WW2 ended, humanity, exhausted from the task of vanquishing fascism and intent on other things, forgot to abolish DST and this remnant of a bygone military policy born in an age of bygone energy sources (the best estimates today suggest it has either zero or negative impact on energy conservation, because whilst people may use their lights less, they use their heating/cooling more), has loitered persistently in our lives wrecking havoc with our health and our children year in, year out. DST is a classic case of innovation that serves no useful purpose. A particularly lethal type of clockwork.
Except it hasn’t been permitted to loiter everywhere. Large swathes of the world have acted in the intervening 80 years and have abolished DST for all the good reasons cited above. Apartheid-era South Africa got rid of it in 1944; British India in 1945, two years before independence; Japan in 1952, Indonesia in 1964, South Korea in 1988; followed by China in 1992 and then by Putin’s Russia in 2011. More recently Brazil freed itself whilst under the right wing populist Bolsonaro in 2019 who declared (correctly) that DST ‘messes with biological clocks.’
Are you starting to see a pattern here?
It seems that countries under authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian rule quickly dispense with DST, whilst liberal democracies find themselves stuck with it. Of the world’s major economies, it is only the western democracies of the UK, Europe, Canada and the USA that still adhere to this deleterious and pointless innovation. What are we to make of this?
There’s a new best-selling book that starts to make sense of it all. In Abundance the policy-oriented journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson outline a thesis of how liberal progressive politics has failed to deliver on large scale change and innovation and sets out a new, aggressive and radical policy agenda for the left. The book is largely focused on America but the problems it identifies and the diagnosis it offers will feel familiar to anyone in the UK.
The authors’ core thesis is that well intentioned liberal policies intended to protect individual rights and safeguard common goods (the environment, minorities of all kinds, endangered species, local communities etc.) from the worst excesses of government have inadvertently led to increased costs and hindered growth due to overregulation bureaucracy and too powerful vested interests which in turn make it impossible for those countries to effect meaningful change, to do anything difficult, to build anything big.
By putting in place entrenched protections against government abuse and the threats of the last century, Klein and Thompson argue, we have hindered government from providing solutions to the problems of our current moment.
High Speed Rail is one of their most persuasive examples. California, like the UK, has been attempting to build a transformative High Speed Rail Network for decades now. Like the UK the project has broad based support from citizens and governments alike, and has attracted massive amounts of funding.
Yet, again as in the UK, the project has been stymied by decades of bureaucratic delay, endless environmental and NIMBY-type challenges and now, despite having been dramatically reduced in scope, is running billions and billions over budget and decades delayed.
An equally depressing and even more impactful example is the housing shortage – where the regulatory restrictions on new home builds have resulted in a profound affordability crisis, with an entire generation locked out of home-ownership (again California and the UK are strikingly similar in this regard, though California’s crisis is underlined now by a huge net loss of people, as disaffected Californians move to Texas and Colorado where they can afford to live in their dream homes, albeit not under their preferred government).
The case studies pile up one on the other until even the most sympathetic of critics (and Klein and Thompson are both self-identifying progressives) must concede that the central problem of mature multiparty liberal democracies is that we find it terribly difficult to do the hard stuff, to make radical change or to build really big things. Instead we are left fiddling with innovation for innovation’s sake — cheaper flat screen TVs and fancier digital watches, rather than solving the really hard problems that threaten both the quality and affordability of everyday life.
That hard stuff: massive infrastructure projects such as HSR, affordable housing and of course desperately required renewable energy infrastructure require enduring political will, long term investment, fast decision making and light touch regulation. Those criteria are also necessary to solve problems that should be easy but are dependent in our procedure-obsessed systems on high degrees of co-ordination and consensus — like getting rid of Daylight Saving Time.
You know what sort of places are really good at making hard decisions, moving fast and damn consensus and special interests? Authoritarian states.
In the same period that California and the UK have failed to build virtually any high-speed rail, China has constructed 23,000 miles of a high speed rail network. Here’s a list of other countries: Japan, Russia and South Korea. You know what all those places have in common? Great High Speed Rail. You know what they don’t have? Daylight Saving Time.
Now, I’m not seriously suggesting we adopt the presence or absence of DST as a barometer of state capacity and no one – except perhaps Donald Trump – is advocating that we make our democracies more like China and Russia. With every safeguard we remove, the possibility of abuse and corruption grows, so the balance is tough to strike, but the argument of Abundance (and the body of work it builds on and popularises in economics, social science, organisational theory) is that there is a way for the liberal left to fix the big problems of our age in ways consistent with our values, through abandoning the age of scarcity and pursuing radical policies of abundance through innovation.
I’m not enough of an economist or a policy expert to know if they are right, but what is abundantly clear is that if the left can’t fix the big problems confronting us, then the strong men and proto-fascists will keep winning elections by pretending they can, and none of us want to see how that movie ends.
My clock currently reads as follows:
The armed response team hastily assembled from Stragnas arrived at Bjurman’s summer cabin at 3:44pm — Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire
The world is on fire, and it’s past time for a hastily assembled armed response team. Is democracy up to the challenge?
Arvind Ethan David is a writer and producer. His graphic novelisation of Raymond Chandler’s Trouble is my Business is available for pre-order as is Douglas Adams: Explaining the World. He has also adapted Lenny Henry's The Boy With Wings into a play, showing at Wimbledon's Polka Theatre later this year