4 ms·

Look around for articles on the cost of DST. Here is one estimate at nearly half a billion a year: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/10/daylight-saving-tim

• acid__ 10y ago
  $434 million / $18.5 trillion = 0.000027 0.0027% of the GDP :)
• nicolas_t 10y ago
  The problem is that it's very difficult to really quantify the long term effects of DST. I know for example, that there's an increase in heart attacks the first 3 weekdays of switching to DST so that seems bad but then the researcher noted that when reverting back to winter time, people had a decreased rate of heart attacks due to having had an extra hour of sleep. It's things like this that makes me think that it's not so clear cut. There's also research that shows that DST reduces the amount of car accidents: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4985756_The_Short_and_Long_Run_Effects_of_Daylight_Saving_Time_on_Fatal_Automobile_Crashes https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4985756_The_Short_a... On the contrary to a lot of studies, this study finds little proof of an increase in accidents in the first few days after the change and explains that by the fact that they considered a higher number of years (28 years) than most research. The problem is that with DST we have the typical situation of having short term effects are relatively easy to study and will tend to be negative (due to the one less hour of sleep) but with potential long term effects that are beneficial but hard to quantify. As humans we tend to discount long term effects anyway so the discussion quickly focuses on the negatives.