It’s Time To Add More Than A Second

To avoid clock drift, the world’s computer clocks will gain an extra second at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turns to July. This adjustment is necessary so that computer clocks can remain synchronized to Universal Time and to the time it takes the earth to rotate around the sun. Don’t worry, you probably won’t notice anything. But, since it takes milliseconds to make a flash trade, the one-second adjustment allows for enough time for problems to arise.

And speaking of time, let’s go beyond the leap second adjustments, and consider meaningful time reform. Since January 2012, my Johns Hopkins colleague Prof. Richard Conn Henry and I have advocated abolition of all time zones, as well as of daylight saving time, and the adoption of atomic time — in particular, Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time (UTC), as it is called today. The embrace of UTC would be beneficial.

For example, the adoption of UTC would give new flexibility to economic management in the vast east-west expanse of Russia, for example: everyone would know exactly what time it is everywhere, at every moment. Opening and closing times of businesses could be specified for every class of business and activity. If thought desirable, banks and financial institutions throughout the country could be required to open and to close each day at the same hour by the UTC. This would mean that bank employees in the far east of Russia would start work with the sun well up in the sky, while bank employees in the far west of Russia would be at their desks before the sun has risen. But, across the country, they could conduct business with one another, all the working day. This would have a second benefit: at least in the far east and far west, the banks would be open either early, or late, convenient for those who are working “sunlight hours,” such as farmers.

With UTC, agricultural workers, critically dependent on the position of the sun, could rise with the sun, without producing any impact on other aspects of cultural and economic life. The readings on the clocks would be the same for all. But, times of work would be attuned with precision to Russia’s local and national needs. China already has adopted a single time zone for the same purposes. And all aircraft pilots, worldwide, use UTC exclusively, for exactly the same reason that we are advocating its broad adoption, as well as for obvious safety reasons.

Author Steve H. Hanke