> ... and just have everybody agree to shift their work day to 7:00 to 4:00.
That "just" is doing a lot of work in this phrase. We live in an interconnected society consisting of lots of quasi independent actors organized in families, office locations, schools, businesses, and many other organizations. Coordinating a change in operating hours for _everyone_ is deceptively difficult.
If a person with a school aged kid wants to individually go to work an hour earlier relative to the sun, you're proposing that he lobbies his employer to set work hours an hour earlier, then lobbies his kid's school principal to start the school day an hour earlier so he still has time to drop his kid off, and then lobbies his favorite coffee shop to open an hour earlier so he can still sip his latte while he walks into the office. The employer has to coordinate with all of the other employees, who have to coordinate with their spouses and families and kid's schools, and favorite coffee shops. The principal has to coordinate with all of the teachers and the parents of all the other kids. The communication complexity of this scheme is exponential. Of course, there will be many opinions about how smart and stupid this change would be, so we'd also need a way to incorporate all of this feedback to make a decision that everyone will follow.
It turns out that we've already developed a method to manage the complexity of gathering feedback and making binding decisions in coordination problems like this. It's called the political system. We elect representatives to the government. Those representatives make proposals, debate those proposals, and, sometimes, pass them into binding laws that everyone has (implicitly) agreed to follow.
So yes, you're right that is "all [we] are doing". It's just that when you live in a country of over 300 million people, the most practical way of having everyone "agree" to do anything is by using the pre-established political system and passing a law. It's much more practical to pass a law that shifts the official clocks back an hour than to mandate starting and stopping times for every single organization in existence.
That "just" is doing a lot of work in this phrase. We live in an interconnected society consisting of lots of quasi independent actors organized in families, office locations, schools, businesses, and many other organizations. Coordinating a change in operating hours for _everyone_ is deceptively difficult.
If a person with a school aged kid wants to individually go to work an hour earlier relative to the sun, you're proposing that he lobbies his employer to set work hours an hour earlier, then lobbies his kid's school principal to start the school day an hour earlier so he still has time to drop his kid off, and then lobbies his favorite coffee shop to open an hour earlier so he can still sip his latte while he walks into the office. The employer has to coordinate with all of the other employees, who have to coordinate with their spouses and families and kid's schools, and favorite coffee shops. The principal has to coordinate with all of the teachers and the parents of all the other kids. The communication complexity of this scheme is exponential. Of course, there will be many opinions about how smart and stupid this change would be, so we'd also need a way to incorporate all of this feedback to make a decision that everyone will follow.
It turns out that we've already developed a method to manage the complexity of gathering feedback and making binding decisions in coordination problems like this. It's called the political system. We elect representatives to the government. Those representatives make proposals, debate those proposals, and, sometimes, pass them into binding laws that everyone has (implicitly) agreed to follow.
So yes, you're right that is "all [we] are doing". It's just that when you live in a country of over 300 million people, the most practical way of having everyone "agree" to do anything is by using the pre-established political system and passing a law. It's much more practical to pass a law that shifts the official clocks back an hour than to mandate starting and stopping times for every single organization in existence.