It'd be pretty surprising if the moon was found to have no impact whatsoever considering how strongly it's impacted many (most?) cultures. A lot of economic discourse is bullshit but it doesn't stop it from strongly impacting peoples' behavior in ways a third party might find irrational, for instance.
> Most cultures evolved prior to cheap artificial light:
Doesn't this predate known cultures by like a million years? Humans are already noted to have been adapted for some life after dark other primates have not been, thought to be related to our penchant for starting and maintaining fires. It's also not clear at all that the switch to artificial light is irrelevant to our behavior—I think we have decent evidence working a grave shift effects most peoples' health negatively.
"cheap" was an important word in that quote. Look again at that graph I linked to.
In 1303, a million lumen-hours cost £40,475 in year 2000 inflation adjusted GBP, or 24.71 lumen-hours per pound. Before the industrial revolution, almost everyone was earning what is now considered "abject poverty", which was about "a [US] dollar a day" in 1996. This is (I think, approximately) £0.66 in 2000 money, which is enough for 13.31 lumen-hours per day if that's all they spend their money on… but IIRC 90% of the entire GDP was food people had to eat to not die, so realistically it was going to be 1.33 lumen-hours per day if they made it their main goal in life and had no other interests.
The light of a full moon on a clear night is up to 0.3 lumen/square meter, which means that the average person could afford to light a single bed (0.9 by 1.9 meters, 1.71 m^2) to the intensity of a full moon (0.3 lux * 1.71 m^2 ~= 0.5 lumen) for up to 2 hours 40 minutes per day… but even then only if they bed was fully boxed in (not from the examples I've seen) or if they had the optics to focus it only on the bed (which they didn't), and a more realistic room size of 4m^2 would have reduced the duration they could afford moon-equivalent light levels to (0.3 lux * 4 m^2 = 1.2 lumen) to 66 minutes per day.
Again, this would be for someone with an obsessive need to have as much light as they could get and thus spent every spare penny on candles or firewood, not a normal person.
And it only gets better by a factor of about 3 from that by 250 years ago.
That graph stops in 2006 at £2.67 per million lumen-hours, before LEDs were taking over from CFL as the efficient light source, and even that price means that if you want to fill a 10 m^2 room with simulated full direct sunlight (100,000 lux), that's 1 million lumen, which is £2.67/hour, at 12 hours per day it would cost about £11,694.60 per year — most people would think that's weird (including until recently the police, who would ask questions about which plants you were growing), but it illustrates the scale of the transformation.
> It's also not clear at all that the switch to artificial light is irrelevant to our behavior—I think we have decent evidence working a grave shift effects most peoples' health negatively.
Indeed, though I'm suggesting that in comparison to that, any impact from the moon is going to be noise.
