I’m getting into lots of fun arguments since posting this. I think a lot of people are hung up on how they personally aren’t beholden to 9-to-5 so it’s all cost and no benefit to them and they suspect that it’s probably a minority of people who are really beholden to 9-to-5.
I think even if it’s a huge majority of people who are perfectly flexible in when they wake up and how they use the day’s daylight, my argument works. It’s about Schelling points.
Also, to be clearer about my model, in winter we wake up at dawn and use all the daylight—little that there is—efficiently. Then the days lengthen and we keep walking up at the same clock time. So we’re sleeping through a lot of daylight, which is inefficient. We want to shift to starting the day earlier in the summer. Changing TIME ITSELF is the only realistic way to do so.
Note that this only applies to a certain range of latitudes. Closer to the equator the length of the day doesn’t change enough for this to be an issue. And close enough to the poles you either have so much or so little daylight that there’s little room to optimize.
In between those latitudes there’s a pretty huge upside to shifting the standard hours when group activities happen to align with when the sun is shining.
And I’m not saying there aren’t big downsides. Mostly I want the debate to acknowledge the tradeoffs!
I’m getting into lots of fun arguments since posting this. I think a lot of people are hung up on how they personally aren’t beholden to 9-to-5 so it’s all cost and no benefit to them and they suspect that it’s probably a minority of people who are really beholden to 9-to-5.
I think even if it’s a huge majority of people who are perfectly flexible in when they wake up and how they use the day’s daylight, my argument works. It’s about Schelling points.
Also, to be clearer about my model, in winter we wake up at dawn and use all the daylight—little that there is—efficiently. Then the days lengthen and we keep walking up at the same clock time. So we’re sleeping through a lot of daylight, which is inefficient. We want to shift to starting the day earlier in the summer. Changing TIME ITSELF is the only realistic way to do so.
Note that this only applies to a certain range of latitudes. Closer to the equator the length of the day doesn’t change enough for this to be an issue. And close enough to the poles you either have so much or so little daylight that there’s little room to optimize.
In between those latitudes there’s a pretty huge upside to shifting the standard hours when group activities happen to align with when the sun is shining.
And I’m not saying there aren’t big downsides. Mostly I want the debate to acknowledge the tradeoffs!