Rob Long: Jay Leno, container ships and other economic indicators

morning call ^ | December 23, 2008 | Rob Long

[george76]

Fifteen years ago, I had a stupid idea. I was the co-executive producer on ..."Cheers." NBC...was faltering: Ratings were sliding, money was tight, management was nervous ...Johnny Carson...was retiring...

I was 28 then, and like all 28-year-olds, I had no idea exactly how stupid I was. So when I found myself standing next to the president of NBC ...I offered my solution to his network's crisis.

"You know what you should do?" ... "You should move the 'Tonight Show' with Jay Leno to 10 p.m. Think of all the money you'd save."

"That's a pretty stupid suggestion," he said to me.

Only, in those days, network presidents tended to be earthier types with show-business vocabularies, so he inserted a colorful Anglo-Saxon expletive between the words "pretty" and "stupid."

He then went on to explain the complicated ecosystem of broadcast television... The five hours of prime-time weeknight programming ... are immensely lucrative... Cutting them out would be suicide.

"The day we have to do that," he wound up, "is the day we have to shut the whole thing down."

Only he inserted a colorful Anglo-Saxon expletive between the words "whole" and "thing."

The Hanjin Miami is a giant, floating, diesel-powered economic indicator. In fat times, it carries 7,000 containers from China to the West Coast of the United States, each one stuffed with flat screens and polo shirts and iPods and toys and jeans and every kind of extruded plastic doodad imaginable.

Ideally, of course, we're supposed to send full containers back, filled with our stuff for them to buy, but we don't make much stuff anymore. We make complicated financial products and arcane debt instruments.

Or did.

In fact, we don't even make the ships that carry the containers.

[BBell]

The majority of college students are in fact girls. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look at the numbers more boys are going to college now then ever before. But the increase in the number of girls who are going to college far exceeds the increase in in the number of boys who are going to college. It comes down to this; too many people in college should not be there.

[RobbyS]

College takes in an enormous number of freshmen just to help pay the bills. They know the kids are not ready. The sad fact is that even good high schools do not measure up to good high schools of the ‘50s. One reason being that women especially who once were content to teach school now are working in other professions.