I’ve posted before (here, for example) about various good segments on CBS’s longest-running news show, 60 Minutes.
Last night, the whole thing was excellent.
It led off with economics. Scott Pelley discussed the huge number of people who were out of work and who were desperately trying to reach the New York state government’s unemployment office to get their benefits. One woman he interviewed said she had worked since age 15 and had never claimed unemployment benefits. She was calling 50 times a day and not getting through. A restaurant owner named Melba told how she had to lay off almost all her employees and wondered how she herself would pay the bills.
Then the segment turned on a dime. Pelley talked to a businessman in Brooklyn who had repurposed his business to produce plastic face shields. He actually was able to hire more workers than he had had originally. He even noted that some workers, concerned about their fellow workers, offered to split a job so that each would work a 20-hour week. Then Melba told of getting a call from a customer who wanted to buy 100 take-out meals to be donated anonymously to local health care workers. It really was quite wonderful.
The second segment, which went about half an hour, was titled “Artificial Intelligence is Preserving Our Ability to Converse With Holocaust Survivors Even After They Die.” It lives up to the title. I can’t do justice to it a short space. What I will say is that my wife, who is Jewish and whose grandparents on her father’s side were murdered by Hitler and his gang, has trouble watching anything about the Holocaust and just loved this segment.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Apr 6 2020 at 7:56pm
David-good post; I’ll need to start watching 60 minutes again. We have a local T-Shirt shop that turned on a dime and are now making and selling fabric masks according to the specs for those in the community. $30 for a dozen and they are washable and reusable. I placed an order to support the small business!
David Henderson
Apr 6 2020 at 11:13pm
Thanks, Alan. Great story.
Phil H
Apr 7 2020 at 12:53am
The Holocaust memorial piece is exception. Once again, the TV show Black Mirror proves eerily prophetic… The episode “Be Right Back” is based on using exactly this kind of technology to preserve a loved one.
john hare
Apr 7 2020 at 5:37am
@David,
In a comment on a previous post of yours I said the direct deaths from Covid 19 would probably be under 10,000. Apparently it is now more than that. I was wrong.
Thaomas
Apr 7 2020 at 8:31am
Clearly the “design” of the unemployment benefit did not take account of the fact that the system is designed for “full employment,” “churn” unemployment, not cyclical unemployment. At full employment the system supposedly works like normal insurance in which it is important to separate real from spurious claims and discourage moral hazard (not seeking re-employment). There are implicit Bayesian priors about both behaviors and the decision to provide the unemployment benefit is based on the priors and the information in the claim. [I suspect that the system is insufficiently generous in the best of times — there are a lot of politicians that vote as if they believe that most of “them” are itching not to work and to live off of “welfare” and we need an army of bureaucrats and strict “eligibility” criteria to defend the taxpayer.]
In mass unemployment, the priors ought to change. It is now very unlikely that the claimant is not really unemployed and very unlikely that they remain unemployed because of insufficient search and that the priority needs to sift to getting money out the door.
That could have been corrected after 2008-2016 but was not.
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