Imagining life in the U.S. under a single clock.

The implementation of daylight savings time inevitably prompts the biannual question of why we bother to set our clocks back or forward. Slate's Tim Harford goes further and asks what would happen if the United States jettisoned its fragmented present-day arrangement and instead functioned with a universal time zone.

Xando happily envisions just such a future world, made possible by advances in automation and technology:

Communications, remote operation and timeshifting abilities have become so great that the only real reason most people work at centralized locations during specific hours is really tradition.

Most white collar jobs can be conducted almost exclusively over the Internet. If it can be measured by some objective metric, you don't need supervision. With increasingly powerful cellphones and WiFi, you don't even need to worry about whether your employees needed to step out - you can contact them at the supermarket just as easily as you can at home.

Automation and remote control can also be used to de-centralize people. A drive-through order-taker can work from an Indian call centre. Your local supermarket can easily become an automated warehouse that empties and loads trucks - even discards old food on a scheduled basis - all under the watchful eye of a single technician who keeps things running. You could even run an automobile factory like this - that control attached to the robotic arm could easily be operated from ten states away with a decent camera setup.

Obviously, some interactions will always be face-to-face. But as people de-centralize, the number of people you absolutely need to accommodate will shrink rapidly.

In theory, this sounds good. But with the link between clinical depression and exposure to sunlight proven by science, FreddiedeBoer worries about a sharp spike in seasonal affective disorder under a universal time zone.  Rrhain also points to the negative human effects of waking up in the dark:

To attempt to have a social life when everybody else around you is three hours behind your sleep schedule is difficult. Now try it when it's five.

The reason why we have time zones is precisely because people want to be in sync with each other: And that means the people you live with every day. They tend to live in the same time zone you do.

A denizen of cloudy and overcast Michigan, Chad-B reminds the author of the article that sleeping at night is natural: "Shifting an hour is one thing, but morning remains morning and evening remains evening. Much more than that, and you wind up with lots of people on 'normal' schedules being required to sleep during daylight hours, which is neither pleasant nor easy."

Recounting his service in the Merchant Marine under a tyrannical captain who "kept our clocks on Greenwich Mean Time no matter where we happened to be in the world," RoyJaruk-18 concludes on this cautionary note:

Interfering with the rhythms of body clocks genetically attuned to keep sun time is not something to be undertaken lightly. Humans were ordering their lives by the sun for millenia before accurate timepieces were invented. It's far better that a few West Coast stockbrokers and employees of the industries that provide services to that group be inconvenienced than it is to foul up the rhythms of millions of people just because those brokers are pissed off their jobs require them to work on New York City time. The idea of one national time zone for the continental United States is idiotic on the face of it.

For those unfamiliar with the scientific concepts behind daylight savings time, run75441 has an excellent primer on the difference between a sidereal and solar day here. AC … 7:27pm PST

Friday, Oct. 27, 2006