Class focused on an
introduction to the "Law of Demand."
The class also made connections to economics after reading the following:
Oregon's post-war economy directly tied to
Columbia River dams
When World War II ended 70 years ago, Oregon's economy was still
heavily reliant on natural resources: Abundant water, thick forests and fertile
soil.
In many ways, that's still the case. It's just that the
way we rely on those resources has changed.
That was the central message delivered Monday evening at
McMenamins Kennedy School in Northeast Portland by Dr. Daniel Pope, professor
emeritus at the University of Oregon. Pope spoke to a group of more than 100
people at the Kennedy School theater as part of the "Oregon History
101" series.
His talk, entitled
"From Ships to Silicon Chips," basically covered how the state's
economy shifted after World War II - and how the shift actually began in the
decade before the war as Bonneville Dam was completed and construction of Grand
Coulee Dam began.
Pope, whose specialties are business and economic history, said
it was the cheap hydropower produced by the Columbia River dams that encouraged
the shift to take place. And in the years that followed, other changes took
place, as well.
High-tech companies began to flood Washington County; vineyards
began to take over the rolling hills of many parts of the state; and a state
that once saw trees as something to be cut down and turned into dimension
lumber slowly began to see them as something to value in their original form.
"Oregon is still in fundamental ways a natural state,"
Pope told his audience. "We are still reliant on forest, soil
and water. But in very different fashion than 70 years ago."
"The resources of Oregon's past have assumed new roles and
gained new meanings."
Pope pointed out that the whole shift had a sort-of backward
start. When the big hydro dams were undertaken in the 1930s during the
Great Depression, they were more of a make-work proposition. There was no
great need for the huge amount of power they would produce.
But World War II changed that. The aluminum plants
that would be key to building bombers and fighters consumed huge amounts of
electricity and the top-secret projects going on a Hanford to produce plutonium
began soaking up more electricity each day than all the public and private
utilities in the region combined, Pope said.
When the war ended, the realization that the hydro dams on the
Columbia and other Northwest rivers could provide that much electricity would
help draw in the new electricity-hungry high-tech companies: Tektronix,
Floating Point, Lattice Semiconductor and, beginning in 1976, the 800-pound
gorilla: Intel, which Pope said is now by far the largest private
employer in the state with more than 17,000 workers.
Not that hydropower was without problems. The dams nearly
destroyed the Pacific Northwest's salmon runs and in the 1970s, the effort to
keep producing cheap electricity led to some major missteps, such as WPPSS -
the Washington Public Power Supply System. The utility's over-reliance on nuclear
energy led to the second-largest municipal bond default in U.S. history.
But other new ideas did work out.
Pope pointed to the wine industry as an example. He said
that it now employs nearly as many people statewide as does Intel and that wine
tourism is worth about $200 million a year to the state.
And he said that Oregon's forests, once seen as a source for
lumber, are now seen as a resource for recreation and tourism, worth millions
annually to the state.
Near the end of his talk, Pope pointed out that Oregon's economy
has lots of problems. It is notoriously unstable and "when the
rest of the nation comes down with the flu, we get pneumonia," he said.
But Oregonians often seem willing to take such problems in
stride and instead focus on quality of life issues. Such an attitude can
be a bit of a double-edged sword.
"Oregon rates high in the standings of life's amenities and
pleasures," he said. On one hand, "we ignore the economy at our
own peril. But we neglect the pleasure of Oregon at our own loss."
-- John Killen
http://www.oregonlive.com/history/2015/03/past_tense_oregon_oregons_post.html#incart_river
