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We basically do that every year, and the results don't look so promising...

"Exploiting the discrete nature of DST transitions and a 2007 policy change, I estimate the impact of DST on fatal automobile crashes. My results imply that from 2002–2011 the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually."

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20140100

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Do we have an estimated cost of switching away from DST? Programmer friend and I were talking today (re: Europe) and he said it'd cost a lot of money for everybody to upgrade their libraries.

I said that its a one-time cost versus those lives (I estimated 20 a transition, for 40 a year), and those lives win even with a very high return on money now.

Nobody won the debate.

I would be interested to know myself. My guess is that the cost of upgrading libraries isn't that expensive. Library maintainers probably have to change things every couple of years anyways when new countries get added or a country changes timezones. Removing DST would just be yet another change but slightly larger in scale. I would assume most of the cost would be from people assuming that DST was in effect, and as a result being late to something important.

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