Daylight Spendings

Throughout modern history, we’ve tended to make changes ranging from radical to routine, each uniquely coming with their own costs. The 1986 opening of the London Orbital Motorway — also known as the M25 — marked the conception of one of the most important roads in the UK, becoming the longest ring road in Europe when it initially opened. During 2003, between junctions 13 and 14 just south of Heathrow Airport, a maximum of 196,000 vehicles were recorded passing through every day, making it the busiest motorway in the UK. Perhaps rather contentiously,1 I make of this that it’s likely also the most useful motorway in the UK.

Imagine that you’re one of the many key decision-makers in Parliament, but that for some reason you hold an unusual amount of power. Superseding the entirety of the Transport Ministry and the Iron Lady, you solely hold the ability to approve the construction of the M25. Let’s also assume that you have perfect hindsight, and access to the exact information that we have now.

In 2018, the M25 saw a total of 637 casualty-causing collisions, of which 5 were fatal. If we extrapolate this death rate to every year since the motorway was opened, this suggests that a reasonable estimate2 for the M25’s death toll is between 100-200 people, with 10,000-25,000 total accidents (constituting a broad spectrum of trauma, both physical and emotional) across its lifetime.

I want to phrase your decision under perhaps the worst lens that I can come up with. Picture the families of those involved in such accidents — the average household size has been roughly 2.5 people, leaving 250-500 close family members, relatives, flatmates, and more to face the guttering experience that is losing someone they are close to. Consider also the financial burden of such a road — in 1986, it cost £1 billion (~$1.35 billion), the increases in global emissions, and to finalise my spiel, this quote from the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Appraisal:

We conclude that the M25 experience most probably does, as is popularly thought, serve as an example of a case where roads generate traffic […]

This decision is not at all easy to make; please do not let me convince you that this motorway is a net negative for the UK! I don’t even have fully formed opinions myself on how much the existence of the motorway does for us compared to the counterfactual. But, having all of this information, it’s kind of hard to look at this choice and feel completely good about one of them over the other.

On one hand, we need massive projects like this because we consistently need our critical infrastructure (which is perpetually inadequate) improved in the UK. It may be prohibitively expensive, or difficult, to prevent the inevitable deaths that come along with it, and if we were to paralyse ourselves with this notion and value these lives so highly, we may reach the conclusion that massive projects should never be approved if they have a solid chance of causing this many deaths, which also seems plainly wrong.

Then again, many other viable, safer alternatives come to mind: we could probably transport the same (if not a higher) number of people by heavily investing in British railways, or some other such method of transport. In typical effective altruist fashion, the money spent on this project could have been used to save millions of people, for example with the installation of malaria nets.

Whether this choice is actually good or not, the question of, “how can I make high-stakes decisions where I know people might die?” comes up for me.

I will come back to this later on, because for the time being, I’d like to talk about, as author and professor of neuroscience Matt Walker put it, a global experiment that over 1.6 billion people take part in, twice a year, across 70 different countries, also known as daylight savings.

All it takes for measurable impairments in your cardiovascular health is the deprivation of 1 hour of sleep. In the spring, when the clocks go forwards and we lose that hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. In the autumn, when we gain an hour, we see a 21% reduction in heart attacks. Further to that, we can make similar observations about car crashes, strokes, workplace injuries, and even suicide rates. For a lot of these patterns, however, it is unfortunate and surprising that the gaining of an hour of sleep in the autumn does not cause a decrease of the same magnitude in these areas.

While we end up gaining an extra hour of daylight, as a consequence of our decision we lose an hour of sleep for a day, and on the scale of the Earth’s population, where minute differences in a population’s wellbeing caused by collective events causes all sorts of messy downstream consequences, it leads to deaths. This brings us to the conclusion I’ve thought most reasonable human beings have had: why do we even do this?

The idea I’m confronting here is that, as people living on Earth, some of us are placed into positions where we can highly influence things that go on to affect many people. In the few areas that uphold direct democracy, or if you are a politician, or otherwise, you very well may be a part of such decisions. It’s remarkably interesting, and also guttering, to consider that the outcome of those decisions could, particularly in cases where it is historically shown to happen (such as the construction of new roads), lead to people dying where they otherwise wouldn’t have.3 It seems quite easy to think about such a death toll and react by never supporting such a project again, and you may be justified. I claim that there’s probably many different lenses you could view this under:

• consequentialism (maximising expected social welfare — can we quantify some increase in some metric that benefits us as being worth a life?);

• deontology (is it not just worth it at all, no matter what, to permit a death except under extremely special justifications?);

• virtue ethics (what would a wise, just, and compassionate decision-maker do?)

You may, or may not, have a kneejerk, harm-avoidance intuition that judges such decisions prima facie wrong because they foreseeably raise the risk of death, but if we’d ever a chance at advancing and making new decisions that could very well be a net benefit, we will likely have to draw some line, one that dictates that the potential costs in lives taken are worth the numerous benefits, and particularly in the weeds of decision-making, most likely under a consequentialist framework.

It is immensely crude, and borderline offensive, to make judgements on the worth of a human life relative to how many hours of travel I save taking one road over the other. At the same time, however, if you came to the decision that you supported the M25 despite an expected 200 fatalities, it means you judge the aggregate reduction in travel time and other gains to outweigh the harm of increasing fatality risk to that extent; equivalently, the average benefit per expected fatality is at least as morally significant as the harm of one death. Likewise, endorsing daylight savings despite the indeterminable number of deaths it’s plausibly associated with means you judge the extra hour of daylight you get to outweigh the harm of the same increase in fatality risk — a less defensible trade-off to many.

None of this licenses trading a named life for a sliver4 of convenience. Yet when pursuing high-stakes, important decisions that genuinely advance humanity, we are forced to make ex ante choices under risk; forced to determine, somehow, somewhere, how much (as we’re forced to go beyond “if any at all”) we are willing to sacrifice. We can support making these decisions not as a celebration of death, not under the guilt-laden wrath of the inevitable consequences of our decisions, but as a resolve to keep the harms of what we must do to go on as low as reasonably achievable while continuing to do what humanity does — pursue genuine, widely shared benefits.