The radical plan to destroy time zones

By Adam Taylor-February 12

Last Summer, North Korea did something a little odd. On the 70th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese occupation, the closed and authoritarian state announced it was permanently turning its clocks back half an hour. The country was creating its own time zone: Pyongyang time.

As a plan, it didn't make a lot of sense. Many, understandably, interpreted it as just another example of Pyongyang's characteristically illogical policy logic. Yet Pyongyang time also highlighted something else. All around the world, time zones make little sense. Russia currently has 11 time zones, while China just has one.

Spanish people are said to be constantly tired because they are in the wrong time zone. Nepal is –inexplicably – the only country in the world to have a time zone that is set to 45 minutes past the hour.

[North Korea’s new time zone is perfectly bizarre]

A recent history of time zones

A look at the development of time zones, from solar time to coordinated universal time. (WonderWhy/YouTube)

Looking over this chaotic landscape, it's reasonable to ask: Are time zones inherently flawed? That's what Steve Hanke and Dick Henry think.

A few years back Hanke, a prominent economist with Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow with the CATO Institute think tank, and Henry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins, teamed up to propose a new calendar designed to fix the inefficiencies of the current one. The plan was dubbed the "Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar." Last month, after reading a WorldViews story about Pyongyang time, Hanke reached out to us to detail another idea that he and Henry had devised to fix the chaos caused by time zones.

The plan was strikingly simple. Rather than try to regulate a variety of time zones all around the world, we should instead opt for something far easier: Let's destroy all these time zones and instead stick with one big "Universal Time."

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