Tuesday, 3 and Wednesday 4 March

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.

The series is sponsored by Oregon Historical Society, Oregon Encyclopedia, Oregon History Project and McMenamins.

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